[tex-live] TL13 status

[Zdenek Wagner]

2013/4/10 David Carlisle <d.p.carlisle at gmail.com>:
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> On 10 April 2013 12:16, Philip TAYLOR <P.Taylor at rhul.ac.uk> wrote:
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>> Then I guess we are forever doomed to be stuck with bad ideas.
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>> What a shame, when the effort needed to pursue good ideas is
>> probably no greater than that needed to continue pursuing the
>> bad ones and was is actually lacking is motivation rather than
>> resources.
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> Phil, you seem to be equating "good ideas" and "bad ideas" with "your ideas"
> and "other peoples ideas"  which is unfortunate (to put it mildly).
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Phil, I know what branches are good for and TL maintainer certainly
know it too. I do use branches when developing the tools for real-time
data processing. I know which changes may be included immediatelly and
what has to be developed in a separate testing branch because the
instrument must work without interruption and the processed data must
go to the web and to international databases. I can do that because I
am paid to do it. I cannot afford to do the same when developing my
LaTeX packages that have less than 1000 lines. I cannot take a
snapshot of CTAN at a release date of a particular TeX distro and make
sure that my packages work with all possible combinations of other
packages at that snapshot. And I cannot find a snapshot of a distro at
a time of a bug report and maintain sumultaneously this-tex-branch,
that-tex-branch, other-tex-branch, whatever-tex-branch etc. Nights are
too short for that. As Markus wrote, most packages are developed by a
single man and usually in leisure time. This is a physical limitation.
Ideas may be nice but if they are not attainable, they make no sense.

> David
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--
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz