Re: bin/47597: local and $() don't play well with each other

[Steffen "Daode" Nurpmeso <sdaoden%gmail.com@localhost>]

tlaronde%polynum.com@localhost wrote:
 |I know ;-) When developing R.I.S.K. (the building framework used for
 |kerTeX and KerGIS), I had to find the minimal compatible set supported

And i actually wanted to produce some tailwind for your KerTeX
once you appeared the last time already!
I imported

  59ccb97 (HEAD, tag: refs/tags/v0.9999.6.1, refs/heads/master) Import 
get_mk_install.sh, 2012-07-12

(and the others individually too) back then right away.
I really do miss some announcement list.

I must admit that i haven't used it yet, being a groff user since
~2001, but i'm really happy that you are working on making TeX
possible in less than 1 gigabyte!  If this would have existed back
then i would be a happy user for sure still today.

(Long story: 'had a working internal package for [business]
correspondence that worked fine after some time, but was very hard
to use.  So i wanted to make it a bit flexible and wrote a second
one that added much more, lists, indexing etc.  Halfway done it
started to look very well, e.g.:

  % 00-05-31: new scheme to avoid waste. now a font is init only if it's used.
  % 2Compare (Cyrix 166+, 49MB, Linux 2.2.13-12, X 3.3.5):
  % | OLD                               | NEW                                   
|
  % 
|-----------------------------------|---------------------------------------|
  % | 1178 strings out of 13013         | 1413 strings out of 13013             
|
  % | 13106 string characters of 122154 | 17026 string characters of 122154     
|
  % | 35574 words of memory of 263001   | 54220 words of memory of 263001       
|
  % | 2086 multiletter of 10000+0       | 2321 multiletter of 10000+0           
|
  % | 80647 font info for 276 fonts     | 20674 words of font info for 70 fonts 
|
  %   (out of 400000 for 1000)

Using lazy initialization etc.
Letters in some two seconds not ten or more that LaTeX would have
needed.  ... so.. with some more generalization this could even be
made public and be some payback to the community at which expense
we shamelessly lived.  So i started merging the two, the one with
the nice and stable output routines, indexing, TOC etc., and the
one with user hooks that aimed to be usable, into a third one,
shtex.tex.

And then i bought the german computer magazine c't and tried
a program "Street Graphics" (or -x or so) from their Shareware CD
and that overwrote all FAT partitions on the system (or wrote some
random bytes in each block or whatever).  And then i found out
that i had forgotten the password of the PGP encrypted backup (no
PGP since back then!), and so everything which was not in my local
source directory, but only on the shared partition(s) was - gone.
What remained is a not even half-completed

  12 fonttest.tex  144 shtex.tex      24 ec.fdf          8 de.lrf

And left us without a working package for correspondence.  And so,
finally, did some quick hack with groff, because that -is- was
installed by default everywhere, and is also just very, very nice.
And it was *really* good to get rid of teTeX.
But maybe (or even: very likely) the decision would have been
different if KeTeX would have existed back then.
Happy packaging,

--steffen