[tex-live] web2c-win32 volunteer?

[Hans Hagen]

At 17:13 13/04/2004, George N. White III wrote:

>For a development environment, yes, but I'm told that for runtime all you
>need is one .dll.  Of course, teTeX uses quite a few utilities (perl, awk,
>etc.).

i use rsync, unison, and ssh from cygwin and always have to fight the 
demands for dll's when i update one of them; it's very hard to update a 
piece of cygwin, so updating just tex would become painful (somehow the 
system seems to know when more than one dll of the same kind is present 
somewhere, even when a proper one is in the path of the binary)

>The problem we face is diminishing returns for maintaining less widely
>used tools on Win32.  You want a way to focus efforts to provide native
>Win32 tools on ones everybody needs, but there aren't the resources to
>handle all the tools that are available on the other platforms.

indeed, so if we could stick to the tools really used it would already save 
a lot of troubles

>The big stumbling block has been getting the perl scripts working.  FpTeX
>gets a head start because it includes a perl runtime, but there were
>problems getting the right kind of slashes in the path to kpathsea for
>Win9x and with directory names that contain spaces.

indeed; i now have some solutions for that but didn't test them yet on 
win95 (i need to know what the cmd shell is capable of, so i have to 
reinstall a few old machines)

>Cygwin tetex has been useful for tasks that could not be accomplished
>using the available Windows disto.  Recently my first inclination when a
>Windows TeX falls down is to give the user a unix account and make them
>figure out emacs.

ok, so that's for those who are forced to use windows but like to use unix; 
we should keep in mind that the average user is not that fond of emacs or 
vi but prefers editors like winedt or scite

>In the long run, people will find ways to work with XemTeX, e.g., future
>tex4ht will work without dvips and pstricks will be replaced by pgf.  If
>not, at least they will know xemacs and shouldn't have much trouble
>figuring out teTeX on linux.

indeed

(from your mails i guess that you're one of the few who knows the problems 
of all platforms that tex runs on -)

Hans