Apologies: I stopped reading the moment I saw the words "Miles David".
HN user
suckerpunch
The output of Latex is so annoyingly good that I would use it to make me a cup of tea if I could ("there's a package for that", comes the faint cry). I use it for essays, reports, and even our Ukulele Society's songbook. Versatile it is.
But the problem is basically this:
You have to close your eyes, cover your ears and hum loudly when installing and compiling, because if you thought about the error messages, the distro size and all the binaries involved, you'd probably wish you were dead. Nothing, no quality output justifies a piece of software like this, it's like the elephant in the filesystem. I have nothing but admiration for the people who put this together, because I couldn't fit a mental model of the Tex system into two of my brains.
Man... I currently work in the same company as Ian Livingstone and he promised a couple of us some boards to use in our next project. I hope he comes through. I started off on the Beeb and the ZX Spectrum and it's be great to come full circle 30 years later :D
Quite exciting, given what a rainy hill climb gitorious is and the lack of much else.
But: Gitosis?
Unless it's back from the dead, its development has long been abandoned. It works just fine, but the new kid on the block is Gitolite, and it makes far more sense.