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

[Hans Hagen]

Markus Kohm wrote:
> I'm glad that there's no such problem with LaTeX, because companies I know 
> often do not use ConTeXt but LaTeX.
>   
strange argument, one can run context as any other tex, but it's more comfortable when ruby is there, if needed i can convert the scripts to binaries; companies i know have no problem with it  

if a company uses tex, then they probably use it in some kind of workflow for which they need to install whatever needed, and installing ruby is a small price 

btw, for you info: the ruby scripts (one actually only needs texexec) is just a commandline for context and also does things like index sorting, keeping track of the number of runs needed etc; i feel sorry for the latex users who need to do that manually (although i would not be surprised if some use make files, perl scripts or whatever, which then also leaves them in the cold since tex live does not provide those either) 

I've explicitly chosen to write this stuff using a scripting language and not rely on some traditional programming language [in which case c would never have been my choice since i never felt comfortable with it; and the original modula versions lacked cross platform compilers]; the fact that the tex commmunity is not able to maintain a real cross platform source tree (ask fabrice) has proven me right in this choice 

anyhow, those who use tex in a more advanced workflow need additional tools anyway; maybe we should discuss which xml tools to include in tex live (xsltproc to start with). 

but, since it looks like context is the reason we discuss this, we can as well quit this discussion; as someone remaked already, context users are quite capable of installing ruby, to which i can add that the last tex collections also shipped with self-contained windows environments build around an editor that could run from the dvd directly. 

Hans 

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