Keith Hellman wrote, on Fri, 21 May 2010 11:08:12 -0600:

Brooks:

First, thank-you for taking over the maintenance of the LaTeX
listings. I, and I'm sure many, many, others consider it a critical
component of our lecturing success in computer science.

There has been a bug filed against the listings package in the Debian
repository:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=569576

The TeX live team seems to think (rather I should say the only member
who has weighed in on the subject, preining@logic.at) seems to think
that this is not a bug, and in fact reflects the expected output of the
package.

My experience (and apparently several others) is that this is not the
way the package worked in previous versions (<=1.3).

So, I'm wondering:

A. Has previous incarnations of the package not been correct?

B. Or is this a bug in 1.4?

Certainly, both could be the case if backwards-compatibility is
a big concern.

My only thought is that (A) allows the author of a document to specify
less redundant information. For instance, I frequently post my example
source for students, but highlight specific portions of it during
lecture. In which case I used to be able to do:

\lstinputlisting[firstline=37,lastline=45]{sample.cxx}

and the line-numbers in the slide matched the source line numbers. In
the current version (1.4), I have to have:

\lstinputlisting[firstline=37,lastline=45,firstnumber=37]{sample.cxx}

Which creates a bit of a input and maintenance headache when sample.cxx
changes (two numbers to edit as opposed to one).

Can you help clarify the state of affairs for the TeX Live team and the
debian distro? I'm happy to forward your response, if it is easier to
simply reply to me.

Thanks for your time and continued support of listings,