[tex-live] Why has initex disappeared?

[Frank Küster]

Hi,

some Debian users have complained that the initex symlink is missing
from teTeX 3.0, and I couldn't tell them the reason. Thomas Esser told
me that he didn't recall the reasons either, but that the discussion
leading to this decision should be in the texlive archives, or the web2c
release info.

I didn't succeed finding it in the texlive archives, and all I could
find in web2c was

,---- web2c/ChangeLog
| 2004-05-08  Olaf Weber  <olaf at infovore.xs4all.nl>
| 
|         * Makefile.in (install-mf-links, install-mpost-links,
|         install-tex-links): Do not create initex, virtex, inimf, virmf,
|         inimpost, virmpost links on installation.  These are all way more
|         trouble than they're worth.
`----

but that's not really the background that will allow me to convince our
users.  It also doesn't give sufficient information for me to judge
whether resurrecting the link in the Debian packages would work, or even
if it would is maybe a bad idea.  It's also been suggested to write a
script that just says that initex has disappeared in favor of "tex
-ini".  And it has been said 

,----
| Even though initex has 8 index references in The TeXbook?!  I can
| imagine Knuth kicking up a fuss when he finds out....
`----

So the thing seems to be a little emotional :-(

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer