[tex-live] question and/or feature request

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2016-12-05 at 13:20:27 -0600, Luis Rivera wrote:

 > Hello!
 > 
 > Any particular reason to not include the etex extension in the tex
 > executable on TeXLive? I mean: it already has the mltex and enctex
 > extensions included,

Hi Luis,
we are not allowed to do so.  Donald Knuth allowed everybody to modify
or extend his program.  He even encouraged people to extend it.  But
he also said that no modified version should be called 'tex'.

 > so why reserving etex for the pdftex executable?

pdftex is compatible with Knuth's tex, but because it's name is not
'tex', it can provide additional features (such as etex).

But what do you want to achieve?  The etex binary already supports
mltex and enctex *because* it's based on pdftex.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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