[tex-live] Re: URGENT!!

[Sebastian Rahtz]

 > I have just installed Omega1.23 this morning (from 1.23) and I
 > must say that it's a Colossal Mistake (TM) distributing this with TeXLive
 > or any of the other major distributions. Please distribute 1.15 which,
 > while not > perfect, is at least much more stable. As John Plaice himself
 > pointed out back in January, "But this [1.23] is not a stable version"!
 
Unless my memory is deeply flawed, TeX Live 6 carried version 
1.23? and this is the first time anyone has mentioned the problem!

 > As a user who has devoted hundreds and probably thousands of hours
 > using and tuning Omega1.12 and 1.15 for mission-critical business it is

with respect, I suggest that using Omega for mission-critical
work is a very dangerous game to play....

 > the stable parts of 1.15. Right-to-left texts loose all word spacing,
 > the omega executable is extremely memory-hungry, odvips does crazy things
 > (I know John has fixed this but too late for TeXLive) and there r probably
if we had the source, we could recompile it. what we dont know
about, we cannot fix.
 > 
 > It is easy for me of course to back up to 1.15 but what about all the
 > newer users of Omega? Apostolos Syropoulos is publishing a book that
 > deals with Omega this Summer: what happens when people buy the book, >

Apostolos should perhaps be considering this problem?

 > get TeXLive or MiKTeX, and have to deal with an unstable, experimental
 > version of Omega?

Omega has always been unstable and experimental, hasn't it?

reverting to 1.15 is *hard* for me. it would mean mismatches
in which binary sets have Omega, I'd have to rejig the source
and I would *very likely* screw up.

If someone else wants to take responsibility to putting TeX Live
back to 1.15, that's fine by me, but I do not have the time to do
it myself.

Sorry to be negative, but waiting until the very day I want to finish
TeX Live to bring up a problem which has been there for 6 months
is not very sensible.

We have 5 choices
 1 someone else takes on the task of putting TL back to 1.15
   and does all the necessary work in Perforce.
 2 we delay TL indefinitely until I find any time to work on it
 3 we remove Omega from TL entirely
 4 we delay TL until Omega 2
 5 we say "sorry" and dont change anything

what do people request? I will be bound by the decision of the
majority of people who vote in the next 2 days

option
 6 Sebastian retrofits 1.15 onto TL7 tonight
is NOT up for choice!


sebastian