Seminar example document not expected to work with updated TeX Live

[Guenter Milde]

Am 30. Oktober 2020 17:03:15 MEZ schrieb Scott Kostyshak <skostysh at lyx.org>:
>On Fri, Oct 30, 2020 at 09:56:40AM +0100, Enrico Forestieri wrote:
>> On Thu, Oct 29, 2020 at 10:54:39AM -0400, Scott Kostyshak wrote:
>> > Our seminar example fails with an updated TeX Live 2020 system. The
>> > maintainer states the following:
>> > 
>> >   it is a problem with the new hook management of the current
>latex.ltx
>> >   seminar is a quite old package and there is no reason to use it
>with a
>> >   new LaTeX format. It won't be fixed, so the usual way is to use
>the
>> >   package latexrealease to get the old hook management.
>> > 
>> > The workaround is to add \RequirePackage[2020-02-02]{latexrelease}
>as
>> > the first line of the .tex file.
>> > 
>> > What should we do regarding the example file for LyX? My opinion is
>that
>> > we should still ship it since there are many TeX systems that are
>not
>> > updated and even for updated systems the workaround is easy.
>> > 
>> > Should we just write a LyX note inside the .lyx file that if they
>get an
>> > error they should export to .tex and put
>> > \RequirePackage[2020-02-02]{latexrelease} as the first line?
>> 
>> It would be much better inserting that line at export time. For
>example,
>> see 42785e62 and 7aad7870 that deal with similar issues.
>
>Agreed. However, I don't know if I will have time to look into that
>anytime soon. 

I put updating seminar.layout on my toro list.

>Also, it seems we would have to use LaTeX code to
>condition on the LaTeX version; i.e., would the line
>\RequirePackage[2020-02-02]{latexrelease} code give an error on older
>TeX installations?

This is quite straightforward with \@ifpackageexists.

Günter