[tex-live] preliminary test image for TeX Live 2005

[Gerben Wierda]

On 9 Sep 2005, at 17:11, Vladimir Volovich wrote:

> "KB" == Karl Berry writes:
>
>  KB> In general, I don't see that these minor discrepancies between
>  KB> arches are a problem.  Obviously something to minimize, but in my
>  KB> mind it is not on the critical path.
>
> OK. Gerben, please compile pdfopen and pdfclose for darwin (powerpc
> and i386), if it will not be a problem for you.

I answered this in a different message.

> We will add bbox and ps2eps to the source tree after a release, then,
> so in this year's release only darwin builds will have them (and in
> those archs who's builders don't mind to build them separately).
>
> Among other discrepancies which would be nice to fix:
>
> * epstopdf in darwin builds differs from what we have in other archs
>   (and in the source.development tree). Gerben, why is that? why do
>   you not put differences into the common source tree, but prefer to
>   have some differences present only in your darwin builds?

Years ago I fixed epstopdf because it was not robust for the mess of  
line endings on Mac OS X. When I offered it to the maintainer(s) I  
got the reply that he/they was working on an overhaul anyway. If have  
in the years after now and then contacted him/them again but nothing  
came from it. I don't remember who it was I mailed with at the time.

I am not inclined to overwrite something in TL when it is part of  
someone else's work, I do not feel I should be that  presumptuous. I  
contact them instead and it is up to them to use it or not. In this  
case, using the original is not possible for me). Besides, I  
generally follow the strategy to get something fixed at the source  
and if that does not work, fix it locally. TL is for me an  
intermediate source for my redistro and fixing it there while it is  
not fixed at the source I find a dangerous strategy because that way  
a fixed bug might suddenly reappear if the original maintainer drops  
in a new version.

> * texdoc in darwin builds is outdated. the file in source.development
>   was updated on 2005/08/03, so again it is unclear why darwin's
>   binaries do not match what is in source tree.

This was a leftover of the time that texdoc was not as smart as it is  
now (today with different settings for different systems) and it only  
worked properly on Linux and friends (starting acroread, a bit like  
pdfopen/pdfclose I imagine). In my build Makefile it was still being  
overwritten by a patched old one. I was unaware that texdoc had been  
improved in TL. I have therefore now stopped overwriting for the  
current release (TL2004 still had one that needed patching).

A next build will have the default texdoc. Thanks for spotting this.

G