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

[David Kastrup]

Jonathan Kew <jonathan_kew at sil.org> writes:

> 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".

For a live system, it might be possible to stuff the required binaries
into a separate private directory and then just adapt the PATH
variable of the executing process to include this separate directory
without putting it in the system-wide PATH.  preview-latex by now does
something like that with most of its installations for preview.sty, in
order not to have to resolve conflicts and installations and whatever
with a preview.sty in the system tree.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum