Martin writes in reply to Lars: > >That's fine by me, I'm in no hurry in this matter. BTW, is the writing of > >such packages a privilege for the LaTeX3 project team, or may the public > >contribute as well? > > You're welcome. They decide only what consitutes LaTeX3. first of all it is THEM not They at least to some people and to the crossword in the LaTeX Graphics companion :-) more importantly, we are eager to have "the public" contribute; most people now members of THEM started off by incoccently contributing (and now feeling bad about being drawn into the all that work that is involvedi n maintaining LaTeX while doing development as well :-) so feel warned. there is the argument that we (ie the project members) shut out others and their good ideas by keeping tight control on 2e these days and rejecting a lot of good ideas on obscure arguments. Yes we are doing that but not on obscure arguments but in our opinion because of the need of the user community for stability and exchangabilities of LaTeX sources. i recently had the pleasure to write a class files for the AIP and they asked me whether i could support their user queries on that class as well (for a while). to my horror i found that the major problems all their users accountered were kernel changes in 2e between 94 and now. in essense i got hit by more or less any feature i used in the current release that was not there in one or the other earlier releases. as it turned out a lot of users had no problem to get a missing support files, eg graphics not installed, keyval not available, or calc not available, but faced with the fact that sometime in 1996 we added the feature that \MakeUppercase can be used in the declaration of a heading turned out to be a major problem as all such users where unable to get their department install a more uptodate 2e (in time at least) this compatibility issue is the main reason why we don't support incremental extensions to the kernel but want to see them in packages up to a point where there is enough to make a clean step forward with enough new features wanted by the community to make them change to an extensively new kernel. with experimental ideas this is even more important. but what goes for 2e as it is now and should not be taken as the message that we do want to implement everything ourselves or are not open to good ideas even if we say, NO, not into the 2e kernel. ----------------------------------------------------- i hope that David Kastrup is on this list as this is relevant to the somewhat unfortunate (and in the end unecessary personal) discussion in latex/2969 we are NOT working on the principles (attributed to big blue) that "if you cant fix it call it a feature by documenting it" or even worse if you can't be bothered to fix it even if somebody tells you how ... ... but we are working on the principle that in 2e designed interfaces should not not be extended in the (2e) kernel and thereby making different maintenance releases of 2e incompatible to each other. with respect to pr/2969 (which you may want to look up in the public bug database to better understand what i'm talking about): i think that the idea of being able to specify key/val type arguments to a package somehow, is interesting and worth having --- in what form is something that i think is debatable ---- but not (in our opinion) by silently changing the defined semantics of the \usepackage command by making the kernel smarter to support "code" as part of the optional argument of \usepackage instead of the advertised (though definitely limited) concept of "a comma separated list of abstract option names, where an option name is a seven bit visible ascii string from without any LaTeX control chars" that interface could and perhaps should be smartened up but not via a kernel change at this stages but via a package (like keyval that smartens up optional arguments in the graphics suite of packages) as the latter ensures compatibilities and allows a user to get a missing package if needed without too much problems. comments welcome good night or rather good morning frank