[Axiom-developer] Re: changes

[Ralf Hemmecke]

On 05/21/2007 03:55 PM, address@hidden wrote:
> 1) The axiom.sty is under revision control because it is needed early
>    in the process, as are most of the things in the scripts directory.
>    Perhaps the need has gone away over time but i doubt it.

Gaby, can you give a better guess than me?

> 2) bookvol1 was published "standalone" so it did not depend on 
>    .sty files which are not in the standard latex distro. The
>    axiom.sty file is not standard so the commands were put into the file.

Hmmm, the first two lines of

branches/daly/axiom/src/doc/bookvol1.pamphlet

read

\documentclass{book}
\usepackage{axiom}

you certainly mean another file.


> 3) I don't like the idea of additional .sty files either. Some of the
>    commands I've needed from other .sty files have migrated into 
>    axiom.sty. This will allow us to have all of the functionality for
>    our "standard" files. Using \providecmd allows people to use other
>    .sty files without errors.

Sorry, I did not say that I don't like additional .sty files. I said, I 
don't like commands defined in .pamphlet files.
Well \providecommand does not change the definition of a command that 
has been defined in a previous package. So that might lead to unexpected 
output for the author. It's just my warning. I cannot do anything about 
it at th moment.

>    However, in some files I've been documenting I need to do things 
>    like draw diagrams using special purpose packages. For instance,
>    I'm documenting the octonions now and there is a "standard"
>    octonion triangle that I'm drawing with xypic. Eventually I'll
>    make it into a .ps file and we can remove the include.

No problem. For now you can use whatever you like. But there will be 
times when we should give out some better guidelines that can be 
maintained easily.

Ralf