[tex-live] web2c-win32 volunteer?

[Fabrice Popineau]

> There is also MinGW, which creates native Win32 programs.

> Than used to provide MinGW executables, and I managed last year to
> compile pdfetex and other pieces of teTeX 2.02 under MinGW; you can
> still find the stuff at http://tex.aanhet.net/mingtex/. I will
> probably try at some time to update those patches to the current teTeX
> beta. But this is not an offer to take over fpTeX.

Providing executables is not the most difficult part even if it tends to become
a repetitive and boring task to patch sources and recompile.

What's more annoying for me is that it is difficult to turn this
stuff into a more real Windows application. There is no point to
distribute 300 or 400 executables: their vast majority is probably never
used. On the other hand, I would like to see people getting a (La)TeX
distribution and start to produce documents painlessly.

Recompiling the binaries using either MSVC or MinGW is not the
issue. The issue is : what to do with this stuff and how to present it
to users.

I built an MSI installer for the whole texlive. I may still provide the
whole texlive/win32 installable from the internet thanks to this
installer. But that won't fit with the 'regular' texlive distribution.

Fabrice