[tex-live] texdoc under windows

[Taco Hoekwater]

Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
> Norbert Preining writes:
> 
>  > But it is not the time to do  it now. Nobody know whether the lua
>  > interface to all the internals is already fixed, I wouldn't swear on it.
>  > And re-rewriting it again and again is a pain. This is material for
>  > after lua inclusion ...

I disagree on that. If Reinhard can spend time on it now, then now
really is the time to do this, so that problems can be dealt with
without the heavy pressure that always occurs in the last few months.

I believe texlua is/will be good enough for scripting use in TL2008,
most changes take place in the tex internals part, not the lua side.
Hans and I plan to have rewritten the context-related perl/ruby scripts
before the end of this year, and these scripts are considerable more
complex than texdoc.

The interface to kpathsea is stable -- unless someone discovers missing
functionality -- and is definately capable of replacing kpsewhich.

The filesystem & os interface is not completely frozen yet, but it
needs user feedback more than anything else. Simply doing everything
the way perl|python|ruby does it is not the right way go, IMO. It
should be usable already, and if Reinhard has requests, these can be
incorporated quickly.

The one thing that is definately missing right now is something
like 'texluatk'. There is no pTK binding for the latest Lua,
and I have not investigated other GUI options yet.

I would be very pleased if Reinhard could spend time on doing texdoc
in texlua. And if he starts now(-ish) we have plenty of time to deal
with any problems long before TL2008's deadline arrives.

Cheers,

Taco