[tex-live] Perl for Windows

[Reinhard Kotucha]

>>>>> "Zdenek" == Zdenek Wagner <wagner at cesnet.cz> writes:

  > For instance, Octave also requires some part of cygwin and
  > gnuplot. 

Only if they are compiled under cygwin.  There are also versions of
octave and gnuplot which do not depend on cygwin. 

  > One package is just EXE which installs the necesary parts
  > without asking the user. It is installed in such a way that the
  > user does not even know about it and these parts can hardly be
  > used outside Octave. However, the installation does not destroy
  > cygwin and gnuplot if they are already installed ane they continue
  > to work. Maybe it could be done in some similar way with Perl and
  > TL.

The disadvantage of using cygwin is that you have to say
/cygdrive/c/texlive instead of c:\texlive.  This would be inconsistent
with the rest of TeXLive.  

I must admit that I never tried to run a cygwin program outside the
cygwin environment.

I do not see any advantage to have Perl in a cygwin environment.
texdoctk, for instance, expects a program called "perl".  It doesn't
matter whether this "perl" uses the cygwin dll or is compiled under
MinGW or whatever.  You'll always run into trouble if there is already
something else called "perl".

What George meant is that you can avoid name clashes if you run
TeXLive in a virtual machine.

Instead of a virtual machine you can add TeXLive to cygwin, the other
tools (perl, gs, xpdf...) are already there.  Cygwin has its own
search path for binaries and so on.  It doesn't interact with the rest
of the system.

You can then rename cygwin.exe to texlive.exe.

However, there are many reasons not to do so:

* Cygwin is good for UNIX people who are forced to use Windows.  I
  doubt that Windows users like it.

* People want to use programs outside the cygwin environment as well,
  which is a bit inconvenient.

I don't think that it's useless to add TeXLive to cygwin, maybe
someone will do it in the future, but I think that it's not
appropriate for the TL distribution.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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