Re: [NTG-pdftex] [ pdftex-Patches-93 ] \quitvmode

Hi Taco, hi pdftex developers! Sorry, for bringing up "old" discussions and primitive. I hope you are not offended by discussing these old topics. Nonetheless I think that some (pdf)TeX changes have to be ... better discussed/discussed again/documented/revised/removed (choose the appropriate, please). I have the background of being a former member of the NTS and the e-TeX team. Within this team we had a lot of discussions about new primitives, how these primitives should behave, what are the implications, the restrictions etc. The result was that only a small part of the discussed primitives have been implemented and only a subset of the implemented primitives have found its way into the official e-TeX releases. This was and is good, because the team was sure that the extensions are as stable as TeX is. And it was and is bad, because e-TeX is "only" a small extension of TeX. On Wednesday, 15 February 2006 10:02:37 +0100, Taco Hoekwater writes:

Reinhard Kotucha wrote:

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In good old days we had pdfxtex. Why can't we have it again? It was a great thing for experimental stuff.

But nothing seems to gets noticed until it is in the mainstream application (and no longer marked experimental), so having a separate pdfxtex quite likely will not help. I am not against reviving pdfxtex, but I doubt there is much to be gained from it.

Do not revive pdfxtex. Integrate new primitive in the mainstream application, to have them available for testing by a broader audience. No extra pdfxtex application is needed unless a change has too many (unwanted) side effects or is in a very unstable state. I propose to (a) better document the new primitive/functionality (this includes atleast a short rationale, why the current (pdf)(e-)TeX has to be extended/changed) and (b) mark all new primitive as experimental until there is enough positive/negative feedback to switch the status for experimental to stable. And probably (c) mark primitive/ functionality as deprecated if it has to be removed/replaced in the future. Knuth has completely rewritten TeX after a few years. IMHO it was a good idea to throw away TeX78 and start TeX82 (almost) from scratch. (It was a lot easier for him at this stage as it is for pdfTeX now because the number of users/macro packages/documents was very low.)

We spent the better part of yesterday talking about a primitive that has been published a year and a half ago, and whose tracker item has been closed since may 2005. That is hardly indicative of an active beta-tester base.

Beta-tester can only test something which is documented. I have just found the e-mails from July 2004 in the mailing list archive. In 2004 I was not a member of this mailing list and the pdftex development has not been moved to sarovar. During the last days I have browsed through short pieces of the pdftex code and the trackers at sarovar to understand some of the (pdf)(e-)TeX extensions integrated during the last years. Thus there will probably more questions about changes during the next days and weeks :-).

Also, \quitvmode is not superfluous except under etex. So:

"Vladimir" == Vladimir Volovich writes:

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at least please avoid adding new unnecessary primitives in the future. :)

I vote for the removal of \indent since it is not needed in etex. We can patch plain.ini to contain its definition as a \protected macro. :-)

I second this proposal! ;-} ... if we are completely switching from the stable base called "TeX" to something which is no more document/macro compatible with "TeX". Regards, -bernd