Re: [Texmacs-dev] [ANN] My public plugin repository

[David Allouche]

On Wed, Oct 29, 2003 at 02:54:03PM +0100, Joris van der Hoeven wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 29 Oct 2003, David Allouche wrote:
> > On Tue, Oct 28, 2003 at 03:17:06PM +0100, Joris van der Hoeven wrote:
> > > On Tue, 28 Oct 2003, David Allouche wrote:
> > > > I have just created a new category "plugins" in my texmacs archive. It
> > > > contains my collection of personal plugins and may be of interest to
> > > > some people.
> > > >
> > > > Everyone is encouraged to modify those plugins and/or add their own
> > > > plugins either using old-tech methods (patches by email...) or by
> > > > creating a personal arch archive.
> > >
> > > Nice. It should soon be possible to make them part of the CVS archive.
> > > I intend to create a 'plugins' directory for extern contributions,
> > > where we can give write access to whoever you want.
> >
> > Though the CVS is arguably a very good thing, I still think it is a very
> > bad idea to start using this legacy technology now instead or GNU Arch,
> > which is much better in every way.
> 
> But not standard yet and the main purposes of using CVS were

CVS is no kind of standard, excepted de-facto.

>   1) Having a public versioning mechanism.
>   2) Having something standard which will attract developers.
> For the non-standard versioning and diff schemes, we will develop
> something more integrated with TeXmacs in the forthcoming years.

Now if you want a powerful public versioning system which makes it easy for
loosely organized developpers to cooperate, it would be more rational
to first look at the available existing solutions. And CVS is _very far_
from being the best available solution.

Claiming that we should not use Arch because it is less standard than
TeX is basically the same as claiming one should not use TeXmacs because
it is less standard than LaTeX or MS-Word. Those _are_ de-facto
standard, This does no excuse them from being one order of magnitude
less good.

> > I would try to figure out a good way to have "your" CVS and "my" Arch
> > essentially synchronized with minimum efford and without losing too much
> > information in the CVS->Arch direction. But, again, I would need some
> > time alloted to this task.
> 
> I am not in favour of allocating time to this task; you are already
> working for almost ten month on Html/MathML conversions, so it is
> great time that this gets finished as soon as possible.

We agree on one thing. Trying to make Arch cooperate with CVS now that
we can simply avoid using CVS to start with is a waste of time.

I bet you that one or two years from now, when Arch will be better known
and you will have been sufficiently pissed off by CVS wrongness, you
will want to make the switch. But at this time there will be an existing
base of CVS users and you will be stuck with it.

One of the reasons I choose to work in free software is avoiding this
kind of nonsense. When there are good free tools (especially GNU
projects...) for a task, there is no reason to use crappy "industry
best-practices" tools.

Please take a rational approach. What are your needs, what are the
available tools, and which one better fits the bill?

Well, my break is over. Going back to symbol conversion.
-- 
                                                            -- ddaa