[tex-live] Perl for Windows

[Hans Hagen]

Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
> 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.  
>   
this path stuff is indeed a major drawback (it should not be too hard to 
let cygwin internally map c:\ to /cygdrive/c ; window progs themselves 
can normally handle the slash differences)
> 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".
>   
there have been some reports that e.g. ruby for cygwin could conflict 
with ruby for windows
> What George meant is that you can avoid name clashes if you run
> TeXLive in a virtual machine.
>   
> * Cygwin is good for UNIX people who are forced to use Windows.  I
>   doubt that Windows users like it.
>   
indeed, also, most gnutools are available compiled for native windows; 
unfortunate exceptions are rsync and ssh for which (afaik) one still 
needs cygwin dll's
> * 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.
>   

wasn't tetex part of cygwin? i once installed cygwin completely and 
ended up with a rather big tex tree

Hans  

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