[tex-live] texlive 2005

Siep Kroonenberg siepo at cybercomm.nl
Wed Mar 16 15:51:54 CET 2005


On Tue, Mar 15, 2005 at 07:27:18PM +0100, Hans Hagen wrote:
> Fabrice Popineau wrote:
> 
> >Definitely. I wouldn't even encourage anybody new to TeX to use dvi
> >anymore.
> 
> indeed, we only need it for metapost but only as intermediate format; i 
> don;t even have a dvi viewer installed (at least not that i know of)

If one wants to stick to dvi documentation, then an alternative
solution would be a documentation browser which converts dvi to
ps/pdf on the fly.

> >>2. There are nowadays some very
> >>nice open source Windows installers, such as NSIS and Inno Setup.
> 
> >Well. This is not an easy issue. My conclusions about it are:
> >- MSI is the way to go. It is a mistake not to use the native
> >installation service. That makes at least InnoSetup out of the game.
> >On the other hand, MSI toolkit is free from MS.
> 
> Inno Setup is ok for small projects, but i wonder how well it would do on 
> something tex live where one also has to run additional installation 
> scripts. Also, MSI provides a better uninstall.

NSIS has various exec functions and a postinstall callback hook.
Its uninstall facilities look ok to me.

As to my MinGW patches: my thinking had been that a MinGW-based
Windows version would require a lot less separate maintenance than
than an MSVC version. But there doesn't seem to be much point in
targeting a revived a Windows version of TeX Live if nobody steps
forward to take it on. Anyhow, if and when there is an update of
the patches I'll announce it on the texlive list.

But I'll have a look at the free MSVC compiler too.

-- 
Siep Kroonenberg



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