[tex-live] Technical showstoppers for TL2003

[Hans Hagen]

At 14:12 13/09/2003 -0400, Karl Berry wrote:

>But the real question is, is the new behavior (and the resulting broken
>packages) acceptable in practice?  From what you and Daniel reported, it
>sounded like the problem was more widespread than a couple of verbatim
>environments.

it is definitely acceptable for users (and usergroups) of languages that 
use accented of special characters

>If it is, perhaps we need to go back to the TL7 behavior, one way or
>another, and fix the various packages and programs for next year, and
>reinstate the change then.  (Always assuming there is a next year.)

there is no clear next year fix except from the filter (well, i can 
probably hack texexec and context to handle things by preprocessing the 
source code) but i think that if we go that way, 8 bit offsprings of tex 
will going to be used; we're living in an 8 bit world (actually unicode 
world, but taht's another station).

>It does seem to me, as Vladimir said, that document processing depending
>on the locale setting is bad for portability, and so the change is good
>from that point of view.  But this is not my area of expertise, so I am
>not sure of all the ramifications.

i wonder what triggered the chance; if it's really true that writing to a 
file is influences by locale settings, then the user should get rid of that 
setting or patch his OS; imagine that perl's file writes would depend on 
locales this way ...

i assume that it's not our intention to send a team of helpers around the 
world to help people add some fuzzy first line or do worse things; at least 
i'm not willing to do that;

(btw, i wonder if all the tcx files were adapted to the change)

Hans
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