[tex-live] texlive 2005

[Siep Kroonenberg]

On Mon, Mar 14, 2005 at 02:45:44PM -0500, Karl Berry wrote:
>     There are mingw compile patches by Siep Kroonenberg.
>        http://tex.aanhet.net/mingtex/
> 
> I see Siep is on the list.  Siep, do you have any plans to continue to
> work on this?
> 
> It looks quite nice, but without any installer or previewer, and being
> based on teTeX 2.0.2, it'll take some doing to be useful to distribute
> in this brave new year.
> 
> Thanks,
> k

If there is real interest, I would consider resurrecting them,
especially if they would be included into the main sources.

The patches consist of a small set of actual patches, which
shouldn't interfere with a normal Unix compile, plus some
Windows-specific sources slightly adapted from versions by
Fabrice, plus some scripts for preparing the source- and build
trees. [pdf][e]tex, dvips and various font utilities could be
compiled with these patches, but the mk... utilities aren't
addressed.

My and Taco's immediate motivation was being able to provide
Windows executables to others of our TeX-related stuff for
testing and that explains what is and isn't there.

The original set was meant to support cross-compilation, but
compilation with MinGW is what matters most, since almost
everybody has a real or virtual Windows system around somewhere to
install MinGW and MSYS on.

But I am a slow worker, and the most I could hope to finish before
the deadline is getting the patches to work with a more current
source tree. 

We still need somebody to coordinate all the pieces that go into a
Windows version, and it isn't me.

A couple more points: 1. pdf being as prevalent as it is, a
previewer is not as essential as it used to be. 2. There are
nowadays some very nice open source Windows installers, such as
NSIS and Inno Setup.

-- 
Siep Kroonenberg