Re: Version 3.39 of the Lout document formatting system now available

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

"Mark T. B. Carroll" <address@hidden> writes:

> address@hidden (Ludovic Courtès) writes:
> (snip)
>> Thus, it should come as no surprise that few people have contributed to
>> Lout over the years; users have de facto been “customers”.
> (snip)
>
> I wonder if this has had an upside. One reason I much prefer
> Lout to LaTeX is that there's a strong feeling of homogeneous
> fitting-together which perhaps partly reflects few cooks.

Yes, same for me.

> Once projects become popular with many contributors, I tend to be
> decreasingly thrilled with each new release; they seem to get
> increasingly ugly and awkward somehow.

I don’t think this can be generalized.  As a counter-example, there are
many GNU projects (GCC, GDB, Emacs, Binutils, Gnulib, etc.), which have
kept a consistent approach despite the increasingly large contributor
community.

Thanks,
Ludo’.