[tex-live] Ruby interpreter for Windows in the TeXLive distribution?

[David Kastrup]

Fabrice Popineau <Fabrice.Popineau at supelec.fr> writes:

> When will you guys admit that what disturbs you much is that
> Microsoft is a commercial company that makes _money_ by _selling_
> software licenses and the real reason beyond this anti-ms behaviour
> is much more political than technical ?  (or at least this the way I
> see it).

We are talking about whether to provide executables or at least
installation images needed to run stuff under Windows.

> It is easy to argument on the defects of Windows, but my kids are
> playing on their computer for years, my father started to use it at
> almost 70 to send emails, connect to the internet, do audio/video
> conferencing with messenger (talking to my kids), my wife is using
> her computer too for her job heavily each day. BTW, they don't
> expierience much annoiyances. And now imagine I switch all these
> people from their XP os to some Unix version and change all the
> applications too for Unix ones. Don't tell me that they will agree
> and be satisfied. Just because they don't want to do any kind of
> programming, they don't want to type in shell commands, they don't
> want to understand how it works. They just want to use it.

Which is the reason why we finally moved my 65-year old mother over to
Linux.  That way, she can't do nearly as much damage to the system
inadvertantly as she managed previously.  And the system can be
examined for problems (usually "disappeared" files saved to some
strange directory) remotely via ssh.  Even though it is a bit of a
nuisance that the 33kBit modem connection blocks her only phone line.
Which is _much_ cheaper than broadband even taking her online times
into account (she does almost only Email, and batches that).

> Let computer scientists use tools for computer scientists but for
> the good or for the bad, Microsoft has done a lot to make computers
> accessible to the largest number of people.

Fine, so let's make TeXLive more useful on Windows by delivering it
with all tools necessary to run TeXLive under a computer made
accessible by Microsoft.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum