[tex-live] Please enable ipc in tex

[David Kastrup]

"Jonathan Fine" <J.Fine at open.ac.uk> writes:

> Please, if not already done, would you build TeX with
>   configure --enable-ipc
> 
> Here is why:
> 
> Ordinarily, TeX buffers its output dvi file.
> Tom Rokicki made changes here on the NeXT platform.
> This allowed dvi files to be previewed while TeX was still running.
> 
> --enable-ipc adds these changes to the system dependent part of TeX.
> This adds a command line flag --ipc, whic turns off buffering.
> 
> The texd project, and also dvipng and PyX, use this when available.
> (All 3 projects are on sourceforge.)

dvipng uses this, really?  I am not sure about that.  While dvipng
can work on a pipe in real time, it would not take a look at the
socket from the ipc flag unless I am mistaken, and the socket
interaction is necessary, isn't it?

Maybe it would be a good idea to add a separate option to web2c that
merely flushes the DVI buffer at the end of each page without fiddling
around with sockets?  I don't think that many programs exist that
actually need the socket.  The buffer flushing should be sufficient
in most cases, right?

It would also have the advantage of compiling and working without
additional library dependencies on probably pretty much every
platform.  So one would not get into the constant "should it be
enabled or disabled" hassle that the --ipc option is suffering from.

Olaf, what do you think?

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum