[tlbuild] duplicates in win32

[George N. White III]

On Mon, Jun 14, 2010 at 12:20 PM, Vladimir Volovich <vvv at vsu.ru> wrote:

> "RK" == Reinhard Kotucha writes:
>
>  RK> Yes, but there isn't such a Perl script in the texmf tree.  The
>  RK> reason is that the psutils distribution contains Perl scripts and
>  RK> programs written in C.  Thus, they come from the Build tree.
>
> we have a mechanism of linked scripts when some scripts maintained in
> the build tree are installed as symlinks from the bin directory to the
> texmf tree (symlinks are actually used only on non-windows bin
> directory, and windows uses a wrapper EXE file to simulate the symlink).
>
> this could be done for psmerge and some other scripts (in fact, there's
> no reason not to do this for ALL scripts, i.e. to install all of them
> into e.g. Master/texmf/scripts/misc/
> and as symlinks in the bin directories.

Some sites have the texmf trees on shared, noexecute, storage.  Others
will systematically disable execute permissions in "data" directories.
Perhaps wrappers that give the script as an argument to the appropriate
program are needed for all platforms., not only Windows.

> installing them as symlinks would:

(or using wrappers)

> * save some space (only one copy of the script, instead of duplicating
>  it in each binary directory; and some of them are quite big)
>
> * avoid possible synchronization problems, when different architectures
>  get outdated copy of some script

And:

* eliminate the need to update binary packages for all the <archs>
when a script is changed.

* simplify the problem of sorting out messy hash-bang lines (if the
scripts are not going to be executed, the first line can be a comment
indicating the "language", e.g., perl, ruby, etc. ).  This can be used
to automate the task of assigning the appropriate wrapper to each
script.

> currently we have the following scripts in i386-linux installed not as
> symlinks:
>
> pstopdf:          POSIX shell script text executable
>[...]
>
> if they all are installed as symlinks, in the same way as we do in the
> Build/source/texk/texlive/linked_scripts directory, we could then
> remove some more of the BAT files in the win32 directory, leaving only
> the generic EXE wrapper.

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia