[tex-live] tl17 pretest init

[Mojca Miklavec]

On 20 April 2017 at 09:30, Philip Taylor wrote:
>
>> For the TeX Live Utility for Mac OS X see:
>>     http://amaxwell.github.io/tlutility/
>>     https://github.com/amaxwell/tlutility
>>
>> Those sources are not yet using the new interface.
> The first link I completely failed to understand (well, the contents thereof, I mean); the second seemed clear enough but appeared to require the use of "git" (which I don't have, and with which I am completely unfamiliar) in order to find the sources.

No. You can browse the sources online.

>  But on reading the prose it would seem that in order to replicate Maxwell's work for Microsoft Windows one has to be familiar with Windows GUI programming,

Well, yes. In order to write a program one also has to be familiar
with at least one (suitable) programming language, I guess. You have
tons of options, there's no need to know the lowest level command.
There's Qt, wxWidgets, Tcl, Gtk, ATL, WTL, MFC, .Net, Visual Basic,
Delphi, the suitable bindings in almost any scripting language, ...
the list goes on and on.

> which I am not.  The most portable interface would, I suspect, take the form of a locally-served web page, but because a browser runs in a secure sandbox I cannot see how it could trigger the appropriate actions

If talking about a webpage, you could use CEF (Chromium Embeded
Framework) and get full access to the system. It wouldn't give you the
native look and feel though unless you try really hard with the CSS.
But then you need to know all of it: C++, HTML, CSS, JS, build tools
like CMake, ...

Mojca