[tex-live] TeXLive 2008 Windows Feedback (Version 20080716)

[Reinhard Kotucha]

George N. White III writes:

 > It will be hard to make everyone happy.

Indeed. But since TL is the official distribution of TUG, it's at
least our goal to make everyone happy. Supporting Cygwin is difficult
ATM.  You can use the win32 binaries but X11 related programs like
xdvi are still missing.  I had been able to compile them on my machine
at work but there had been problems with xetex and dvipdfmx, most
likely because some libraries are missing.

I already tried to run xdvi.exe which I compiled on Cygwin outside the
Cygwin environment.  After I found out which DLL files it needs it
didn't complain about missing DLLs anymore but it told me that it
doesn't find any X11-server.

What I probably can offer in next year's release is that I put
xdvi.exe into bin/win32.  It will not work on native Windows but on
Cygwin.  I need the help of Cygwin users though, at least it would be
nice if people can inform me about new Cygwin releases and
compatibility problems with different DLL versions.  Nicholas, if you
are interested, stay in contact with me.

However, it would also be very nice if teTeX will be replaced by TeX
Live in the Cygwin distribution.  The Cygwin package management system
is quite crude.  This allows for keeping the TeX Live updating
mechanism without clashing with their (non-existent) own one.

 > If TL provides a complete perl system then users will want bug fixes,
 > updates, etc.  It is much better simply to avoid possible conflicts with
 > whatever perl the user chooses.

There is another reason we decided to provide a subset which only
supports the scripts provided by TeX Live:  If we provide a full
version then people will use it to write their own scripts.  Then we
have to provide all the HTML documentation too.

It's not a big deal to download and install the full versions of
ActivePerl and Ghostscript on Windows if people want to write their
own scripts.

We definitely want to provide all Perl modules required by scripts
which are part of TeX Live.

In this context, the fact that some Perl modules needed by perltex had
been been missing is clearly a bug.  Thanks, Nicholas, for reporting
it.  If you want to try it immediately, download

   http://tug.org/~kotucha/missing-mods.tar.gz

 > > 2) The self-contained GhostScript distribution is broken for most of
 > > its own scripts. For example, ps2pdf and friends do not work because
 > > the lua wrapper cannot find the original script in the GhostScript
 > > library directory.
 > 
 > Lots of testing will be needed to sort out issues with the various
 > scripts that use gs for Win32.
 
Cygwin provides Bash, symlinks, and an X11 server, and so on.  It's
clearly a Unix environment.  The wrappers had been designed for native
Windows only.  I hope that bin/win32/symlinks4cygwin.sh solves the
problems reported by Nicholas.

I must admit that no attempt had been made to support Cygwin.  It's
too late now for TL-2008 and next week I'll be in Cork.  And my
personal opinion is that Cygwin maintainers should update their system
first.  Replacing teTeX by TeX Live and keeping tlmgr intact would be
a great thing.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha			              Phone: +49-511-3373112
Marschnerstr. 25
D-30167 Hannover	                      mailto:reinhard.kotucha at web.de
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