[Texmacs-dev] problems with TeXmacs versioning scheme

[Leo]

Hi All,

this semester I chose TeXmacs as an "officially recommended"
publishing system for a graduate class in Wireless Telecommunications
I am teaching at Rutgers. Most of the students dutifully downloaded
and installed TeXmacs on their Linux boxes.  First surprise: many of
the students downloaded an "unstable version" 1.0.1.X thinking (and
rightfully so) that it is an 'X' maintenance release to the 1.0.1
version. As a result, I recently learned that among my students
TeXmacs got a reputation of a rather unstable system. Of course, I
explained the best I can that it is TeXmacs-1.0.1 which is stable and
that TeXmacs-1.0.1.X is a developing branch leading towards 1.0.2.
But to be honest, I tend to agree with my students that the versioning
scheme chosen for TeXmacs is quite unconventional and may cause
certain degree of misunderstanding and frustration.  For instance,
within the current scheme there is no natural way to label debug
releases for 1.0.1.

Would it be possible to adopt a more conventional versioning scheme
for TeXmacs development?? Linux kernel versioning scheme works just
fine and will cause little misunderstanding, for many people are
familiar with it.

Any suggestions??

--Leo--

P.S. By the way, in addition to students I introduced TeXmacs to
several faculty memebers. Major problem is TeXmacs insistence on using
bitmap fonts even in Postscript output. As a result, PDF files
generated from such PS files look quite ugly. In the scientific
community (at least in the US) PDF format is a de-facto standard for
document exchange. Poor quality of PDF documents will definitely
slow down TeXmacs acceptance.