Re: distro info

[Oliver Buerschaper <oliver.buerschaper@mpq.mpg.de>]

> Who said that "the only way to properly interact with TeX is via the
> command line"? What I said is: you can provide all the GUI tools you
> want, at some point (and this will be rather sooner than later)
> problems will crop up, and these problems will be impossible to
> resolve if you don't want to use the command line, don't want to learn
> about PATH settings, don't want to learn about where configuration
> files go and what they do. This may be different in, say 10 years, but
> it would be misleading to pretend that it is different today. TeXLive
> 2008 is just being tested, and in this regard, it's no better than its
> predecessors. Unless and until we have systems which will be easier to
> maintain, users who expect to be able to stay away from the CLI are
> bound to be disappointed.

Not necessarily I guess. See below.

> Your example about Apple's Xcode actually proves my point: I said that
> if you can afford to throw a couple of million $ and a dozen
> programmers at this, it is actually feasible (but will still take
> time). Apple has done just that; the Xcode IDE hasn't been built by
> volunteers in their spare time, now has it?

That's right. My point though is that once the installation has been  
done via a GUI (a rather simple one suffices, by the way) there's no  
need for knowing about paths and configuration files. (That is, if the  
installation package doesn't happen to be buggy in the first place …)  
And this also applies to updates unless you want to perform them  
manually. However, I don't think many people would think of updating  
any large software environment (Xcode, KDE, Gnome, … whatever) without  
the help of a GUI package manager. I also doubt the end user will ever  
have to tweak any configuration files of TeXLive. Neither would they  
be willing to. I wonder why this has to be different for ConTeXt …

> As for "fumbling around with dozens of configuration files": such
> exaggerations are not very helpful in this discussion.

Well, until roughly two weeks ago, this wouldn't have been too  
exaggerated though ... now thanks to Hans' and Taco's efforts this has  
improved vastly! There's probably still some way to go.

Oliver
___________________________________________________________________________________
If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki!

maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context
webpage  : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net
archive  : https://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/
wiki     : http://contextgarden.net
___________________________________________________________________________________