David Kastrup writes: > > To put it bluntly: why would I need to persuade people like you? The yes why? to put it bluntly: the style you show make me wonder if you are a person one wishes to work with after all. isn't this possible with a bit more politeness and less personal insults? please do not introduce such "rtfm idiot it told you so" mentality into a discussion group that is essentially build on mutal respect for each other. Tim, though i'm repeating David now partially, the reason why switching the underlying engine would perhaps be a good move is that - it enables development of 2e packages that need it (and then work if you say latex foo.tex without problems, eg especially for people working with tex shells and can't simply replace latex by elatex on the command line---as they have none) - the switch is by now painless as it can be done in the big standard distributions, ie behind the scene and it doesn't affect any current usages, ie a current latex format on tex behaves like one on etex except that the latter can use my trace package properly or the new inpmath package (despite the open question of what happens with that) - it the major distributions would switch without harm it would be easier to later upgrade to an l3 kernel that actually makes use (already in the kernel) of etex primitives - i and others might be able to sleep longer and not work so late at night (see time :-) as our code requires less maintenance to work for you and others (that's the everest argument, just dealt with some nfss problem) - David could perhaps sleep better as he wouldn't need to worry about my or other peoples feet :-) by the way, you too assuming you use a web2c based implementation have switched engines several times without noticing, eg the pristine tex isn't real tex any more these days at least on the command line it offers additional features. the main point for me against it is that i don't wish to give the impression that a l3 would be necessarily based on etex, it will be based on more than tex and the etex primitives are a good start as a requirement, so all this could probably be explained in a suitable policy statement. but coming back to my hurting foot, that David seems to be so concerned about. i don't wish to remove his believe that his wisdom is the (only) reason for triggering events, but this seems to be just another time of things getting ripe and his famous plea for a policy is something that would have happend for the next latex release even without him nagging, though perhaps not to the extend that a suggestion to change the default engine would be part of the proposal as it is now under discussion. one thing however is quite certain for me. there will be no 2e kernel that requires etex as a formatter, my intention is rather to make 2e essentially frozen (except for severe bug fixes and fixes/extensions in 2e side packages) with the next release and from then on only work on l3 development that will going to use etex primitives (or even more if a suitable successor shows up). As part of this new work somebody might want to implement a new kernel that is essentially 2e in features but using the better programming features of etex. who knows, perhaps then people will switch from 2e to that new kernel simply because that kernel has less (or different) known errors as the 2e kernel has (most of them are called features these days:-). however, i doubt it (especially that it would become fast enough a stable production kernel to warrant promoting such a move) and i would undertake such an excerise for other reasons if at all. does the above helps you to understand (and perhaps even promote) what the benefits for you would be? good night frank