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

[gnwiii at gmail.com]

On 6/30/06, Sebastian Rahtz <sebastian.rahtz at oucs.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
> David Kastrup wrote:
> > 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.
> Doing this for libraries as well will take some doing.
> You'll have to wrap everything in a shell script
> or the like.

Win32 users are used to running via some GUI or an editor with "LaTeX" buttons.
(People who don't use WinEDT are always asking me for help making
4allTeX work in Windows XP).  WinEDT generally provides 2 ways to run
the external programs (macros and batch files, and they provide their
own versions of things like pstopdf.bat).

The problem with all this is that a) you risk breaking things for the
people who want to use the installed tools, and b) the list of stuff
we need is growing.

I don't think TL will be able to keep up, since the people who are in
position to actually to the work are so few.  It would be better to
put the effort into some sanity checks for the installed tools to warn
users about missing/broken/"too old" 3rd party tools.  I'd rather see
more of the tools (e.g., JabRef.jar) that are interest only to TeX
users.   If there are enough people running Win32 without decent
network access, there should be a much larger demand for a CD/DVD with
tools such as perl, ghostscript, sam2p, imagemagick, inkscape,
cinepaint, ruby, Java, tk/tcl, .... than there will ever be for TeX
Live.  If somebody does a nice job of THAT, we might think about
including it in TL.

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia