[tex-live] Re: Please enable ipc in tex

[Gerben Wierda]

Catching up....

> Note that I am not the author of the ipc code, and don't know _that_
> much about it.  It seems to me that aggressive flushing of the dvi
> file enabled by --ipc is a side-effect of needing to do this on the
> socket.
>
> The ipc code definitely opens a socket when --ipc is given.  To be
> precise, it is a UNIX domain socket named "$HOME/.TeXview_Pipe".  With
> --ipc-start it also tries to run "open `which TeXview`" as the
> consumer (see IPC_SERVER_CMD in texmfmp.c).
>
> I suspect that for large dvi files, if there is no listener on the
> socket, TeX will just hang on a write on the socket after a while.  It
> looks to me like TeX writes typically 6 bytes per page on the socket
> (which is really used to synchronize the viewer with TeX).  With OS
> buffers typically 1024 or 4096 bytes, that means 150+ or 650+ pages.
>
> If you (generic you) want just the aggressive flushing, feel free to
> propose a patch.  I think I've figured what would be required, but it
> is something I'd like to see independent confirmation of.
>
> Also a proposal on how to specify it on the command line would be
> useful.  (As usual, I'm not saying I'd incorporate it, but I do want
> to know what lines of thought people have in the matter, if only to
> make sure that I don't do something by myself which turns out to be
> utterly useless.)

If I recall an earlier discussion on this subject, a big plus would be if
we would have something  like "serialized PDF" as output of PDFTeX such
that this socket-signalling could also be used by PDF-previewers next to
DVI-previewers.

G