Hi Vladimir,

 LS> PS.  Small comment on the few Ukrainian articles I have seen:-
 LS> ASCII i is often used for \cyrii, even in TeX typescripts.
 LS> Sometimes systematically, and sometimes at random. Whence the
 LS> question:- To maintain good hyphenation, is it customary to set
 LS> \lccode of i (and of I) equal to the ASCII code of \cyrii.  If
 LS> not, there must be a lot of faulty hyphenation.

VV> well, i think it is a fault practice to (mis)use a latin i instead of
VV> a cyrillic letter cyrii (especially since it is present in encoding).

Faulty practice may be involved for all I know.  But might it not be a
faulty (i.e. Russian?) keyboard being used in the Ukraine?  One where
the \cyrii is inaccesible.  In such a case TeX should perhaps pardon
rather then punish!  And it certainly can.

(I believe that \cyrii \CYRII is the one and only Ukrainian letter that
looks like an English letter but like no Russian letter.)

 VV>> note that the collection on the above URL is transliterated on the
 VV>> fly by web server

 LS> I did not spot that; by CGI script?

VV> no, it is produced by so-called "russian" Apache web server.

VV> i had a feeling that xxx.lanl.gov has .dvi, .ps and .pdf files
VV> pre-generated.

No. The xxx.lanl.gov server network for science eprints does do
amazingly complex conversions on-the-fly.  I have heard that there
is a bit of cheating at minor mirror sites (delegation and cacheing),
but at xxx.lanl.gov it is a rigourous on-the-fly operation based on
".tex".  I believe that the aim is to be so efficient that all science
can be covered by one agency with just a couple of employees,
and equipment no more expensive than an automobile. Of course the
employees are both texperts and unix/linux programmers!

 > what to do in case of errors?
 > what to do with multi-pass
 > running? what to do with figures, non-standard packages, etc?)

If it runs once it runs always.  PROVIDED packages offer backward
compatibility.  In truth I am as amazed as you that package drift
does not poison the operation.  I would have used ".dvi" as
 a more steady base than ".tex".  At any rate,  here is motivation
to impose backward compatibility on Cyrillic TeX!

 Cheers

Larry S.