[tex-live] TL and win32

[Reinhard Kotucha]

Sorry, Stsazek, for the very short reply in the morning but I had not
more time.

>>>>> "Staszek" == Staszek Wawrykiewicz <staw at gust.org.pl> writes:

  > I like that we have tex.exe too for win32 (not linked to pdfetex),
  > but please, if we want TeX Live to be really "live" for so many
  > users, we have to change the default 
  > parse_first_line = f 
  > to
  > parse_first_line = t
  > in texfm.cnf

This is certainly wrong.  All format files except that for Knuth's tex
are created with pdfetex and will not work with Knuth's tex.  And I
suppose that enctex is not available either.  It shouldn't be, at least.

  > Please, have in mind that TL is for "users", not only for DEK.

But tex is supposed to behave exactly like Knuth's tex.  This was
Thomas' idea when he replaced the babel stuff by Knuth's hyphen.tex a
few years ago.  It is also a license issue.  It doesn't make much
sense to guess whether Knuth agrees with some changes or not because
we have etex now.

Since tex loads Knuth's hyphen.tex it is completely useless for
people who need other hyphenation patterns.  People who want
additional features should use another engine, etex for instance.
There is nothing in tex which is not in etex.

  > Returning to our disscusion concerning separate texmf.cnf for w32,
  > I'm convinced that we should do it anyway. Akira introduced some
  > more variables in texmf.cnf (for xetex) which are related only for
  > w32. Thanks to the investigations made by Jonathan and Akira, such
  > additions doesn't hurt the rest of world, but for a sake... I'm
  > going to upload changed texmf.cnf-4WIN.

Well, adding variables is not a problem.  What I do not recommend is
to remove the -sys stuff.  If you cannot distinguish between
getnonfreefonts and getnonfreefonts-sys I fear that users and system
administrators install files in the same directory which will lead to
severe problems with file permissions (as happened in TL2005).  Thomas
designed all this with care and if you want to change anything you
have to be very, very careful too.  Unfortunately there is not much
time for testing.

Regarding different texmf.cnf files for UNIX/Windows:  It doesn't hurt
if they are different, but I'm not completely convinced that this is a
good idea unless there is a good reason.  If you provide a different
version vntex users will be grateful if you set the variable OSFONTDIR
there so that the system fonts are found.  On the other hand I do not
see any problem setting it in the generic texmf.cnf too.  The best
solution however is if the installer sets the environment variable

   OSFONTDIR=%SystemRoot%\Fonts//

  > 2. what is the status of getnonfreefonts? I found that generated
  > one (and on svn repo) is different with that found on Reinhard's
  > site (and on tug.org). 

I wrote the html file a few hours before I went to Marrakech because I
assumed that you can't reach me there.  Later I uploaded
getnonfreefonts, wget, pdftodsc to the TL repository.  I also uploaded
the wget sources to Master/source as required by the current version
of the GPL.

  > What about windows binary: any .bat or wraper made by irun?

I created .bat wrappers.  But you deleted everything anyway.  Please
don't worry, I will check whether getnonfreefonts is installed
properly in all Master/bin directories tomorrow anyway.

  > 4. as for Ghostscript, I'm going to add support/gs854w32-gpl.exe
  > which will be also installed on demand by tlpmgui. The problem is
  > that it is installed by default in C:\Program Files\gs (I hate
  > that!) and the installer have to make env variables for such crazy
  > directory.
   
Hmm, please keep in mind that it is not sufficient to run the
installer.  The batch files are still in the lib directory and not
copied to a directory which is in PATH by the ghostscript installer.
At least this happened to me when I installed it at work.

It is much better to have a zip file which is supposed to be extracted
in tlroot.  I'll create such a zip file tomorrow.  You can look into
it and decide whether you want to use it or not.

I think that it is easier for the TeXLive installer just to extract a
zip file in tlroot and you can avoid ugly env vars.

Maybe it was not a good idea to delete all old files in bin/win32.
I have no overview about what is missing now, but besides
getnonfreefonts at least thumbpdf.exe had been removed.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha			              Phone: +49-511-4592165
Marschnerstr. 25
D-30167 Hannover	                      mailto:reinhard.kotucha at web.de
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