Re: Elisp addiction not as bad in light of Linux forkoholism

[Emanuel Berg]

Marcin Borkowski <mbork@wmi.amu.edu.pl> writes:

>> It is simple: Don't fork - program.
>
> Wow, it's rant time!
>
> So you're in for a treat: I have a spare minute, and
> let me share a story with you. (I guess I read it in
> some interview, I don't remember now.)

...but for a lot of stuff you seem to have an
excellent memory.

> When DEK coded TeX (and published the cource code),
> he thought that many people will actually customize
> TeX (= the engine) to their needs. It turned out
> that (apparently) the macro programming was more
> powerful than he expected: almost nobody did that,
> people did wonderful things at the macro level,
> without ever touching the source code (apart from
> increasing the memory constraints, which required
> recompliation back then). This includes not only
> LaTeX and its styles (later: classes and packages),
> but also a BASIC and Lisp interpreters, a few
> numerical engines, a regex engine (recently), an XML
> parser and much more. (This is, in fact, an
> oversimplification; some of these things require
> e-TeX, which is a relatively small extension to the
> engine.)
>
> The real hacking on the underlying engine did
> happen, of course, but not that often. Most notably,
> we have e-TeX, pdfTeX (which is great), pdfeTeX
> (which combines both of them); then we have XeTeX
> (originally only on Mac, now also Win and Linux),
> Omega and Aleph, and - most recently - LuaTeX (which
> is the most serious modification, and a very well
> designed one AFAIK). (There were admittedly smaller
> extensions, like encTeX, but they could be
> technically just patches, not "forks".) Not really
> that many "forks", for a program more than 30 years
> old. Especially that eTeX and pdf(e)TeX are not
> considered forks now, rather legal successors
> (hardly anyone uses the original tex engine
> nowadays), and LuaTeX gains more and more traction;
> some (me included) hope that it will mostly replace
> the more conservative versions some day. (LuaTeX is
> AFAIK the only one which took the idea of giving TeX
> really new things seriously.)
>
> (Well, there was also NTS, but it was really a
> clone, not a fork, and it is almost "evaporated" in
> Orwellian sense (even the sources are nowhere on the
> 'net!) - go figure.)
>
> I guess it is a bit similar as in the Emacs world.
> If you make a program flexible enough, people won't
> fork it too much - they just won't need it.

That's absolutely right. But the question is: do
people really need to fork Debian just to use init
instead of systemd? init, of course, was used in
Debian until very recently (I first saw systemd on a
3.17.1 kernel). If indeed impossible, Debian is in
part to blame.

And there is no doubt that the Emacs C/Lisp
architecture really makes extension smooth (I can't
think of any better way) - just type the code and
evaluate, using the same software, with immediate
effectuation - no need even to restart the program,
let alone recompile the whole thing.

That said, I think it *is* very possible to get init
to work on the most recent Debian releases as well. A
distro is by definition just a way of putting many,
many things together. Forking just to replace one of
those puzzle pieces with another is like blowing up
the terrorist camp to free the hostages.

> (The existing forks solved some /real problems/:
> 8-bit-ness with Omega, complicated dvi->ps->pdf
> route with pdfTeX, limited registers and other
> constraints with eTeX, impossibility of RtL
> typesetting with Omega and XeTeX, lack of access to
> system fonts with XeTeX, problems with advanced
> programming and other things with LuaTeX.)

There is a lot of LaTeX in you post. Consider posting
it on comp.text.tex or on you home page, if you have
one.

Yes, I use xelatex on Linux to compile LaTeX.
Previously I used pdflatex but I changed because of
some Unicode issues.

I think it is natural with a couple of parallel
versions/dialects/implementations for huge software
systems. That has always been the case. But Linux
distributions? I can't give you an exact figure, but
it is several hundreds.

And it makes even less sense as Linux is a basically
non-interactive kernel. I don't see why you can't just
use it to run whatever software you like?

> Just my 2 cents.
>
> (And re: Debian vs Ubuntu, I never used Debian, but
> Ubuntu is a huge disappointment: it has been less
> and less usable recently (especially compared to,
> say, five or seven years ago), and it will be kicked
> out of my machine when I have a few spare days to do
> a reinstall.)

Typically, the coolest and most experienced people use
Debian :) I never used Ubuntu but most people I meet
who are Linux users use it. So it can't be that bad.
It is oriented to desktop people, though now Canonical
wants the mobile market as well. Ubuntu is in a way
Debian + Apple: the system is basically Debian but on
the top they have been very active with polishing, and
to the left and right, "lifestyle marketing" has not
been neglected.

Also remember that the Debian fork Ubuntu has been
forked many times for similarly questionable reasons:
Kubuntu (to have it in KDE instead of GNOME), Xubuntu
(ditto Xfce), and so on. (Sometimes I think the WM
developers do that just to market their software.)

-- 
underground experts united