Re: [AUCTeX-devel] Re: concerns in the documentation

[David Kastrup]

Surendra Singhi <address@hidden> writes:

> David Kastrup <address@hidden> writes:
>>
>>> Anyway, (I'm talking to the other XEmacs folks here)
>>> wouldn't it be better if we removed AUC-TeX from our packages
>>> archive, rather than distributing such an old version ? (I'm not
>>> volunteering for the package maintenance; sorry, no time).
>>
>
> I feel AUC-TeX is a wonderful package, unfortunately it is not being
> brought upto date; but it will be bad for several XEmacs users to
> remove it completely. Speaking from my own experience, I would have
> not found it out as a substitute for Win-Edt, if it was not a part
> of package manager. I can vouch the same for many XEmacs users in my
> lab, who just use AUC-TeX, because it is easily downloadable from
> the package manager, or is a part of the Sumo.

But the users of a lab are crippled with an AUCTeX version that does
not even contain preview-latex, one of the more useful features for
creating math.  It is not the only significant improvement.  And
reports about the XEmacs package available from the AUCTeX download
page indicate that it installs rather unproblematically.

The version in the Sumo tarball is not activated by default: this is a
large inhibitor in its visibility to unsuspecting users.  An
up-to-date version of AUCTeX would make itself the default TeX mode
(while providing an easy way of disabling it for users who really
don't want it).

Removing it from Sumo would mean that we could start providing
packages for operating system distributions without package conflicts,
and those packages would also be automatically active.

So I don't really see that the visibility of AUCTeX will suffer in the
long run by removing a broken and outdated version from Sumo.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum