Expediting the Process

We believe that the process described above will occur fairly quickly. The TDS committee spans a wide range of interests in the TeX community. Consequently, we believe that most of the key issues involved in defining a workable TDS definition have been covered, often in detail.

Further, a number of TeX developers have been consulted about implementation issues, and have been trying out suggested TDS formats. Thus, we hope for few surprises as implementation gets under way.

Finally, there are several (current or prospective) publishers of TeX-based CD-ROMs. These publishers are highly motivated to work out details of TDS implementation, and their products will provide inexpensive and convenient ways for experimentally-minded TeX administrators to try out the TDS.

Efforts are under way to set up a ``TDS Registry'' that will coordinate the assignment of TDS-compliant directory names and provide a definitive database of TDS-compliant software distributions.