[tex-live] [www-ptex 163999] Conflicting binary/format names: platex is polish and japanese

[Marcin Woliński]

Dear All Involved Parties ;)

As the maintainer of platex (the Polish one) I vote for dropping the
Polish platex format file.  I'm also open to renaming the directory in
the TeX inputs subtree.

The separate format file is no longer needed.  Typesetting in Polish is
perfectly possible with the default Babel-based format (provided Polish
hyphenation patterns are enabled).  [The 'Polish' hyphen.cfg was my
reaction to rather strange status of Babel which is not part of the
LaTeX kernel yet it adds some new user-visible commands to the format
file (e.g., \selectlanguage).  I used to claim that Babel breaks LaTeX
rules (see cfgguide, p. 5).  I still find it at best terribly misleading
that cfgguide points to Babel as a model for customizing hyphenation,
but if one follows that hint one ends up with a hyphen.cfg incompatible
with LaTeX's license.]

As for the directory in the inputs area, the main item there is
polski.sty --- a package for typesetting in Polish.  Other files are
mainly of historical importance (support for strange ways of encoding
Polish letters in source files) or will become such soon (support for
the 'PL' family of fonts being phased out by Latin Modern).

So I think it is acceptable to rename the directory after the main
package: polski/.


With best,
Marcin