> (Beware: latex support takes more > time than you think: I once thought it would only take up one weekend > and a free trip to Hamburg). I can't think who gave you that idea;-)...so there's no such thing as a free trip---what's new? Latex/Linux: compare and contrast! I have not yet read the article and only skimmed the discussion here so far but the following bit of history may be relevant. A few years ago we were challenged (I think that is the right word) to make the LaTeX distribution and modification conditions more GNU-like;. Following e-mail discussions that make the current discussion look like a single lost packet, this led to a meeting with the Archbishop of Free Software himself, with whom Frank and I had a very challenging (definitely the right word here) and profitable discussion. The result was that we (well, at least the three of us) understood several fundamental differences between maintaining (and developing) a certain two large bits of software: one a compiler system and the other a document processing system. The results of these discussions for LaTeX, clarifying and explaining our policy, are in modguide.tex. I am not at all keen on the concept of "lessons from history" but it seems likely that there are also fundamental differences between an OS system and a document processing system. One of these differences, which is very important and I think also distinguishes LaTeX from Linux, is that LaTeX is both defining a language for describing documents as well as implementing a processor for that language; whereas a lot of parts of both Linux and gcc are implementing processes whose interfaces are defined (and often standardised) elsewhere. Very few people send C code to others who are not C programmers and certainly not to publishers, secretaries, their bosses etc etc etc. (OK, it is possible to distribute some code packages quite widely to people who have access to a reasonable compiler and expect it to get configured, compiled, installed etc reasonably easily). There is nothing in my experience of the Linux world which is anything like any of this at all; what am I missing? Another is that, because the functionality of a compiler or an OS is itself usable only via compiled executables, there is typically a layer of people between the users of the systems and the writers of the code that defines the systems; this multi-level structure does not typically exist with LaTeX. If `using Linux' for most people involved writing bits of code in (a small subset of) C, and that code acted directly on the kernel data structures, then I would not be `using it' and Linus would not be a sane and contented person! None of the above is intended to argue in favour of any particular set-up for handling LaTeX but just to indicate that it needs its own solution, not that which works for a different system. chris