With regard to the recent discussion of problems processing LyX documents
with old LaTeX2e installations:
As the official policy of the LaTeX maintainers is that you should upgrade
regularly (for example, trying to build a format from a latex.ltx file
more than a year old gives a warning message) I think LyX should not cater
to old LaTeX distributions. What it should do, however, is issue an error
message during the configuration process and say "your LaTeX is out of
date".
Rather than testing for particular commands it uses, I think LyX should
effectively require a particular date of LaTeX. If LyX is released on
dd/mm/yyyy, then it should be reasonable to require LaTeX of dd/mm/yyyy-2.
Of course, this will probably change when LaTeX3 is released, and of
course LyX should not *try* to use new commands just for the sake of it.
But it does seem reasonable that at the moment, while LaTeX is in a state
of development, it should be possible to require a fairly recent version
(if LyX were built directly on TeX the situation would be utterly
different).
--
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/rrt1001/ | maxim, n. wisdom for fools
