[tex-live] TL and win32

[Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells]

Reinhard Kotucha wrote:

> I hope that they have TeXLive/bin/<platform> as the first entry in
> PATH, otherwise we can't guarantee anything.

I liked the rest of your message, Reinhard (esp. "Windows
users aren't idiots"), but I have to comment on this one part.

I agree completely that "we can't guarantee anything"
if TeXLive/bin/<platform> isn't the first element in the
path, but every software package is forced to adopt the
same heuristic, which means that 99.9% of them can never
guarantee anything :-(

Isn't it time that we (by which I mean "we software developers",
although it is a long while since I could call myself that with
any degree of justification) came up with a system that /could/
allow us to guarantee that our particular software package
would run as expected without requiring that our system,
and our system alone, had the right to pre-empt the first
slot in the path specification ?

** Phil.