latex back end?

[Karl Berry]

Hi Patrice - so now that 5.2 is out, where are we in the scheme of
things?  Can we move towards the latex back end?  As you know, that is
remains my biggest wishlist item.

As I recall, you wanted to unify the top matter so it wouldn't normally
use conditionals.  Given the parsing of @titlepage (the contents of
which we'd presumably want to include the latex output), I'm not sure
what more needs to be done.

I think it's possible that it would work well enough in practice to
include @iftex and exclude @ifnottex in the latex output.  Generally,
including the top node in either the tex or latex output doesn't seem
like it would work well to me.  That's not how any existing manual is
written.

Wdyt?

Thanks,
Karl