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

[Jonathan Kew]

On 30 Jun 2006, at 2:27 pm, Hans Hagen wrote:

> Jonathan Kew wrote:
>> -- this is the hardest call, IMO.... In the case of my OS X and  
>> Linux  machines, I don't want a texlive installer that sets up a  
>> separate  sandboxed copy of Perl/Ruby/Python/Ghostscript/ 
>> ImageMagick/whatever;  I want the TeX world to use the current  
>> versions of these utilities  from my system. If texlive includes  
>> packages so that I can install/ update to the versions it needs,  
>> so much the better, but that's not a  high priority.
>>
> this reminds me, on linux i ran into the situation that xetex  
> expects imagemagick to be installed (which is kind of tricky since  
> there can be multiple versions)
>
> for such occasions fptex always had the relevant lib files present  
> in the bin path, using some unique name; what do you suggest with  
> respect to unix: installation alongside or depends on the os  
> packages (libs)? (i assume that on the mac gerben takes care of it)

The usual texlive approach has been to statically link pretty much  
everything, but I'm not sure how practical this is for a tool that  
depends on imagemagick, which in turn depends on a bunch of other  
libraries.... at some point, we may have to say "it won't run unless  
you have at least version XX of imagemagick.... or rebuild the  
binaries on your own system, linking against the version you have".

What's really annoying is when distributors change the library name,  
so that existing binaries can't run without updating the makefile and  
relinking. I suppose it may be needed because of binary  
incompatibilities between the library versions. But I'm not sure that  
deciding to build our own separate space, so that we control  
everything, and ignore the outside world is a good answer. I don't  
want to operate in a "TeX ghetto".

For Linux distros, I'd guess that most packagers will rebuild  
binaries using dynamic linking, and package them with appropriate  
dependencies on other packages, rather than use statically-linked  
binaries from texlive. It's then up to the packager and the package  
management system to deal with version issues, etc. I can easily see  
that you could have run into problems with xetex, though, as it isn't  
yet being handled in that way.

(BTW, on the Mac, xetex doesn't use imagemagick; it uses quicktime to  
import graphics.)

JK