On 10/28/2015 03:59 PM, Scott Kostyshak wrote:
On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 01:29:51AM +0100, Uwe Stöhr wrote:
Am 26.10.2015 um 22:42 schrieb Scott Kostyshak:
- There are 2 sorts of layout issues that could violate the rule:
1. Layouts for journals: We often had the discussion about this and my own
experience is that one MUST follow the latest style guidelines of the document
class (e.g. IEEEtran or whatever), if one does not follow, your paper won't be
accepted. Therefore LyX becomes useless if it doesn't support the latest styles.
This is a good point that I had not considered.
Yes, though these are a special case. Not all packages are like this.
Our policy should distinguish journal styles from other styles. That
said, there are often many journals that use the same style, and I'm not
sure they always use the same version. Obviously, they should get their
s**t together, but we can't exactly demand they do so.
2. layouts/modules for packages where recent version removes old styles. An
example: 2 years ago moderncv deprecated the commands \mobile and \fax. Of
course the new versions of moderncv keep the old commands for compatibility.
Now imagine: the moderncv developer drops \mobile in 2016. Then users of the
latest moderncv would not be able to compile their files. Such a case doesn't
happen often, but it might be, therefore before a major LyX release we should
look through all layouts and modules and support new commands that deprecate
other ones, no matter if this is in TeXLive or not, since we cannot know when
the package authors drop support for obsoleted
commands (and because the major LyX cycle is about 2 years). users of older
versions can still use LyX as before because they don't need to use the new
styles.
In general, I agree with you that when we document our new "rule" we
should have several cases like the ones you mention above and also as
Georg mentions (e.g. an added optional style).
This seems like exactly the case to me that argues for version-sensitive
styles. In the short term, what this would mean is moderncv-14.layout,
moderncv-15.layout, etc. It would be up to the user to choose the right one.
Longer term, we should think about some way to make styles senstive to
the version of the package that is installed. E.g., we make a certain
style available if the installed version is 1.5, but not for lower
versions; or conversely, the style is available only for earlier
versions. Obviously, the chkconfig.ltx script would need to be modified
to make this kind of information available to LyX.
Richard
