we're not going to cripple the compilation by the existing complexity of No one is talking about "crippling" anything. with clean source trees that one can download and compile on all relevant platforms without trouble If you're talking about Windows, I don't believe Akira makes many changes to the sources. But I've never actually looked at his tree. I know he does not use configure at all (of course). On every other platform, it already does build out of the box so far as I know. One of my hopes is that we will be able to adapt Taco's cross compiling so that we can build all the Windows binaries that way. Jonathan is looking towards that for his new front-end. If all you wanted to compile was tex and mf and use it on one system and have no add-on macros, sure, it would be simple. Obviously we are very far from that. one thing that really bothers me is that tex and friends, being just data proessors (not much gui mes sinvolved), There are GUI programs in TL of several varieties (xdvi, info), although I don't think they add much to the perceived complexity. have such a huge and complex source tree Given the constraints of operating from a language that was dead for systems programming in 1980, a software engineering methodology that forbids us from modifying the original source (tex.web), a bewildering array of programs and authors each of whom likes to do things in their own way (web vs. cweb vs. (c)tie vs. C vs. C++ vs. shell scripts vs. Lua vs. ...), and almost none of whom have any interest in configuration issues, I'd say it's more amazing that it builds on every known platform with, really, minimal trouble for people. If you have any practical suggestions for how to make the build simpler, believe me, I'd love to hear it. TL is pretty much unique in the free software world, in that we provide precompiled and relocatable binaries and a runnable tree of thousands upon thousands of files for N platforms. You can't expect it all to come for free. And you can't just wave your hands and say we don't need it. Sorry, but when I hear about how horrible the TeX sources are, I get to feeling a bit defensive! karl