Bernard Gaulle <[log in to unmask]> writes:

> David Kastrup writes:
>  > Heiko mentioned that e-TeX broke french.sty (which apparently
>  > caught Bernard by surprise), so it would also seem apparent that this
>  > was not the first time the matter was brought up.
>
> once again there is no open report about any bug in french.sty with
> eTeX (there was one in the last century... which was quickly
> corrected).

I stand corrected and have passed this information on to the
tetex-pretest list.

IIRC, it must have been about 4 or five years at least when Thomas
Esser asked around whether he there was a reason not to be shipping
eTeX by default.  At that time, this might have been one reason
against it.  Another, of course, would be to provide a pristine TeX
for those expecting it (I think Thomas considered shipping only eTeX,
also for plain TeX/virtex/initex at that time).

--
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum