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From:
Frank Mittelbach <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Mon, 6 Jan 2003 18:46:52 +0100
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David wrote

 > > But the question then arises:  why e-TeX?  Why not Omega, an
 > > e-TeX/Omega hybrid, . . . ?
 >
 > Because functionality present in e-TeX is desperately needed for
 > implementing more versatile output routines than the present, was
 > explicitly requested by LaTeX project team members and implemented
 > for their sake.

well, to get some historical facts right :-) ... the LaTeX project never
explicitly requested anything that is in eTeX and i don't think one can say it
was put there for our sake. what happened was that some parts of eTex have
been a sort of "reverse-engineering" of stuff that got solved in LaTeX + some
functionality that the eTeX developers thought could be useful perhaps.

I seriously doubt that there is much in terms of new functionailty that
actually allows more functionalty in TeX. There are however some bits that
make programming simpler and more straight forward. Speaking of what we
"requested" from the eTeX team (but what was unfortunately never implemented
due to the fact that eTeX development stopped) is recorded in:

http://www.latex-project.org/papers/etex-meeting-notes.pdf

and

http://www.latex-project.org/papers/etex-math-notes.pdf

 > Instead of refusing to step forward until we can go as far as
 > possible, we should concentrate on going as far as necessary, and
 > e-TeX _is_ necessary and available.

this is in fact at least partially true (and different from the situation in
1998). these days eTeX *is* indeed more or less generally available (but see
below). in 1998 when the Oldenburg meeting happened I (for my part) rejected
the idea of moving to etex as it was then, for the simple reason that

  a) it was not generally available for a large part of the community (at
least not without hassle) and

  b) it did only provide benefits for the developers but no benefits for the
user as such. as a result people would have been (even more) reluctant to
switch.

as i said i think the situation is better now, but one has to be aware of the
fact that there are in fact a large number of commercial implementations
around that do not have eTeX support on board! and anybody who has done some
support for publishing houses will know that authors (especially) in the US
often come along with PCTeX, Y&Y, ...

 > In contrast, Omega is a moving target and widely undocumented.  The
 > features specific to Omega are rather orthogonal to most of the
 > problems the LaTeX3 project is tackling.

I second the nice phrase "widely undocumented" :-) but i disagree that the
features specific to Omega are orthogonal to most problems that we try to
tackle. or rather I would like to rephase that: as it is today, that statement
is true, but as of today most of the programming and functionality support
that i would like to see in a successor of TeX is also not part of eTeX (again
see above paper on the Oldenburg sessions). Now eTeX is dead or frozen as far
as I can see, Omega is not.

Now you are right that a moving target is of not much use to LaTeX either. For
this reason we've been in close contact with the Omega team to see if there
could be a maintained/moreorlessfrozen/documented/... Omega+- that has

 - good parts of etex
 - good parts of etex oldenburg notes
 - good parts of omega as of now
 - good parts of ...

within a reasonable short timeframe and see whether that could be used to
move further development to. whether that is possible is something (I guess)
this year will show.

for my part an eetex (ie etex+oldenburg) would do as a first step as well the
benefit of just using etex however is fairly small (though it exists for new
stuff) whether it is a good move to suggest for 2e is a different matter and
that is what started this discussion.

why do i think it may not be a good thing for 2e?

because even though etex has a wider distribution these days, it has not
necessarily a wide enough distribution and it doesn't immediately offer
features that make people die for it, eg to take the trouble and change their
installation. eg take the protection (that is solved within LaTeX perhaps not
perfectly but it works, eTeX will make the internals work better (except that
it may not work at all as it did have a bug there) but from the outside for
the user nothing changes.

 > The current ignorance of e-TeX is not merely hampering ongoing LaTeX3
 > efforts, it is also crippling people working on LaTeX2e packages.
 > Even if LaTeX3 will be released in 10 years only, it is a shame not
 > being able to work with e-TeX before.

nobody hinders you to do that right now: you could in a package
check if eTeX is there and if not print out a rude message and exit. that is
what Martin called "etex aware" i guess. but it is slighly different from
changing the 2e kernel so that it dies on a vanilla TeX and therefore perhaps
on 1/5 of all TeX installations (that are in real use)

 > I am not talking about what users will be forced to use once LaTeX3
 > comes out.  I am talking about what engine should be available to
 > LaTeX2e users and upwards.

so it seems to me that to answer this question really is to evaluate if the
concerns mentioned above are real or imaginary; also to evaluate if it would
be important to actually have eTeX support in the kernel. there is nearly
nothing that really must be done in a format (other than loading hyphenation
patterns), thus even an output routine could be loaded afterwards replacing
the current routine.

 > In addition, one can't find out what additional primitives the core
 > would warrant if one never gets into a serious state, and one can't
 > get into a serious state if one choses to wait all the time for
 > non-existent features.


 >
 > I can tell you a dozen good reasons why it would be an excessively
 > bad idea to declare Omega the default TeX engine for LaTeX now.  I

agreed, but now is no here nor there. any default engine needs to be stable
and maintained and basically feature frozen.  whilst omega does not provide
such stability it is not a candidate.

 > can't give you a single reason why e-TeX should not be declared the
 > default TeX engine for LaTeX _now_.

not agreed (uncertain).

 but to be honest, it is something i was considering a few weeks ago at least
for everything in the xpackage area. as for the 2e default engine I have my
reservations for the reasons outlined above. but then encouraging people to
provide packages that use eTeX features might be a first step in this
direction.

frank

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