On Fri, 31 Aug 2001, Frank Mittelbach wrote:

>  > PS And of course since I don't believe that a team of two people can
>  > do all these things, I definetely believe that the team must be expanded!
>
> i'm not so worried about that (the german saying "is too many cooks will spoil
> the porridge") and i doubt that Omega would be where it is now had it been
> built (or probably then rather not built) by a bigger team --- just look at
> any other good programs around and you will find that typically there are not
> many key people behind it originally.

I was just thinking about LaTeX and Perl. Both systems were originally
created by one man. But I strongly believe that the work of some other
folks have helped the systems to gain wide acceptance and to mature.
Think about the NFSS and the babel package: without them LaTeX would not
be the tool it is today. The same applies to Perl---the work by Tom
Christiansen, Jon Orwand and many others helped to make Perl the universal
tool it is today. So, I believe that the Omega team must be expanded,
unless of course someone is afraid that the copyright notice of some
programs  will  change... (which, BTW, will never occur!)

<snippet>
but i'm far more worried about the needed support afterwards if you want it to
be stable and used by millions
</snippet>

Yes, but when noone really knows how things work, then we cannot ensure
this. TeX the program is very well documented, but Omega is not documented
at all. As an example consider this: A recent paper by the Omega team
demonstrated how one can create MathML code from mathematical expressions.
The problem with this paper is that they don't explain how we can
reproduce what they write. I tried the examples without success. But, when
I checked the undocumented Omega source code and I found two undocumented
commands, \MMLstarttext and \MMLendtext. These commands must surround a
formula to get MathML output... Not an ideal situation for a TeX
successor...

So, we need real documentation (why not use cweb for the C part of Omega?)
and a real manual. Since, there is no real manual, we do cover this
"gap" in our forthcoming book on LaTeX and Lambda. But, the documentation
of the code must be the work of an expanded Omega team.

A.S.


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*Apostolos Syropoulos                                          *
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