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

[Hans Hagen]

Jonathan Kew wrote:
> 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".
the windows version of xetex is some 20 meg (if it had been statically 
linked), so i guess that a static linux version is about that size; for 
texlive i think this is ok since there is room on the dvd; after all 
there are bigger files in the tree
>
> 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
indeed
> 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".
indeed
>
> 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.
sure, choosing for such dependencies is up to the distributer (as long 
as they also provide support to users who don't get it running, need 
help with compiling, locating binaries or whatever libs); for user 
groups it's rather handy that they can say: "if something fails, take 
texlive (te/fp/gwtex cq. miktex), and if it works all right then, seek 
help elsewhere"

Hans


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