Scripsit Walter Landry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Well, the reason I mentioned md5sum in particular is because the > implementation is in the public domain. It could be included in the > LaTeX installation.
Not really - it would break the impotant technical invariant of LaTeX that it is all written in the TeX macro language. I believe that this invariant has technical merit: LaTeX should be able to run in every platform that has a working Knuth-canonical TeX, even on, say, machines with no C compiler. A solution that required the LaTeX kernel to be able to interact with C-based checksumming code such as md5sum, would itself be a case of sacrificing clear technical wins to enforce a social convention - exactly the sort of thing that we've used to argue *against* the LaTeX people's current renaming principle, just more so. Providing an interaction between TeX code and md5sum in the first place would not be trivial at all - unless it was done as some sort of extremely ugly one-time hack (which would have to be done in the TeX engine, which is presently separate from LaTeX, which is a Good Thing) it would open up quite disturbing new security perspectives, for instance. > It might complicate installation, but I can't imagine it would be > that big of a deal. Imagine again. -- Henning Makholm "Slip den panserraket og læg dig på jorden med ansigtet nedad!" -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]