Joseph Wright writes: > I guess I see a difference between 'being able to add things' and > 'having to add things'. Packages such as fontenc, caption and microtype > provide functionality that, in my opinion, should be in the kernel. (I > favour a much more ConTeXt-like coverage of 'official' material, as you > know.) oh I guess we are in agreement here, eg a font handling mechanism belongs to the kernel (as it is with 2e) a float handling mechanism belongs to the kernel (as it is with 2e only that the one from the kernel is fairly primitive so that people wrote up alternatives such as caption) etc. And microtype came long after the 2e kernel was frozen. Anyway, I still maintain that it is better to have a frozen kernel and documents that say they use microtype or xyz then to have a kernel which is a moving target and changes functionality from one day to the next (which is precisely what happened in the last years of 2.09 prior to 2e providing a new and bigger kernel and a mechanism to clearly extend (but document) functionality. So yes. I want us to include everything that we feel is "core" eventually (!) in the kernel for latex3, but to build (and freeze) that kernel only when we are ready for it and have a uniform interface. And this is why xor, xgalley, xcoffins etc do not yet should go into it while we are still experimenting with interfaces and ideas for those specific parts even though eventually they will all become pare of the kernel functionality. For example, the coffins ideas got several big rewrites and only now are ready or close to ready to be added to expl3 (and later to a more monolithic kernel. For the same reason I think that it was probably a mistake to even start on a small scale with adding something like l3font to expl3 --- as we have seen even the few commands in there underwent some serious changes as this clearly shows that we are far from ready here (and the same is probably true for the luatex support so far as again those haven't been thought through to more final conclusions and having them as xpackages for now wouldn't hurt at all (even though it means loading such code seperately) --- the advantage is that there is a clear distinction between experimental but fairly final code and really experimental code). cheers frank > -- > Joseph Wright >