[7896] in testers
dvips and outreach
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Hawkinson)
Tue Mar 10 02:34:26 2009
Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2009 02:33:27 -0400 (EDT)
Message-Id: <200903100633.n2A6XR6W025244@outgoing.mit.edu>
To: testers@MIT.EDU
From: John Hawkinson <jhawk@MIT.EDU>
When hacking on tex documents, I'm entirely used to
dvips file
to print file.dvi. Under debathena, this produces file.ps.
There seem to be considerable resistance to changing this,
since it's more and more the default on more and more tex
distributions. I can't say I buy this argument, but that's
ancillary.
What are we doing to educate users about differences like these?
I'm not sure how you solve it.
If you make a list of hundreds of things changed in DebAthena,
no one will read it, and users can perhaps google and find it
after they get frustrated and say, "Oh, well, I can't yell at them
as loud because they did put it on their web site," but it's
not actually *helpful*.
You could wrap dvips in a wrapper with a zephyr or a zenity
message the first time you use it if your .generation is too
old, but that seems (a) like a lot of work (b) potentially
unhelpful if people ignore messages the first time, etc.
I assume there is a large set of issues in this category, so I worry
what the answers are.
--jhawk
