nov 15 tds...

[Pierre MacKay]

 >   I do not see how it is reasonable to ask that package authors supply
 >   such scripts.
 >
 >   I know something about TeX and a little about unix. So how should I
 >   write install/remove scripts for Macintosh, VMS, Atari.... I recently
 >   helped someone write a texsys.cfg file for an Achimedes which was bad
 >   enough not knowing anything about the file structure there except that
 >   it used . as the directory separator, (just to make life fun:-). If I had
 >   had to provide a script in an Archimedes scripting language (if it has
 >   such a thing) I dont think I could have started.
 >
 >   Having automatic remove/install scripts would be nice, but given the
 >   portable nature of TeX it does not seem practical to me. Of course
 >   such scripts tend to be very simple so it may make sense to distribute
 >   scripts in sh or REX or perl or something  with the hope that porting
 >   to a TDS compliant setup on another machine would then be
 >   easy. However you can not expect the original package authors to know 
 >   more than a couple of operating systems. 
 
Agreed that package developers cannot be expected to know the arcana that
would lead to appropriate scripts for installing and removing packages
on a variety of systems.  I certainly couldn't do it for DOS or Windows,
and have no intention of learning how.  

But a map file along the lines of what Solaris packages supply would
make the job of the installer a lot easier.  I'll work one out for
ibygrk as an example.

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