On Sun, Nov 06, 2005 at 02:38:09AM +0000, Julian Gilbey wrote: > On Fri, Nov 04, 2005 at 06:12:09PM +1000, Greg Black wrote: > > > > That was an astonishingly bad decision. I have tons of > > software, much of it written more than a decade ago, which has > > happily been using TeX to produce all kinds of printed output > > [...] > > Maybe a bit bad, but we're only talking about the tetex-specific > configuration scripts here - texconfig, fmtutil, updmap - not anything > else. These would rarely, if ever, be run by automated scripts > (excepting package maintenance scripts).
You are deeply mistaken here. I started to dig exactly because I was bitten precisely by such automated scripts. You see, if you have a packaging system, like rpm but other too, then packages may and do run various scripts during an installation; for example to register a new font map for just added extra fonts. Another possibilty is that a system administrator/maintaner created various "private" tools to help in a maintenance of her/his system(s) and those may invoke those configurations scripts. Tools in that category may be at least partially interactive but this still does not change things very much. You may retort that whomever was writing those tools should be more careful and not to make mistakes but you are setting traps, especially by differences from a version to version, then somebody is bound to be caught. You still may help even after such changes by signalling that maybe something is happening which was not really meant. Michal
