[tex-live] private "tl-bin" directory?

[Reinhard Kotucha]

>>>>> "George" == George N White <gnwiii at gmail.com> writes:

  > Windows problems are very much worse, [...]

They obviously are, but I don't know whether we (people involved in TL
development) do everything properly.  Recently I asked about a good
place for $HOME and the result was that people told me that the
environments had been quite different on different versions of
Windows.

What we actually do to adapt TeXLive for Windows is to
reverse-engineer things.  Is it really true that Windows is
completely undocumented?

Does anybody know about documentation in the internet?

  > Many Windows systems will have the gs installed by the user, [...]

There are two problems we have with gs for Windows currently:

  1. The batch files are not installed properly.

  2. The fonts supplied with gs are problematic because they had been
     modified but the UniqueID had not been changed.

The first problem can be solved by reporting the bug to th GS team.
The second problem is more problematic.  The GPL allows such
modifications and I don't have the time to start a discussion about
such things with them.

I think that in two years GS will be shipped with Jacko's fonts anyway
because nobody wants to use anything else.

Then GS can be a separate package which has not to be touched by TL
developers at all.

It would be nice to have a Perl on the CD/DVD which can be installed
separately from TeXLive.  However, the only reasonable perl
distribution for Windows is ActivePerl.  It's very good software and
documentation is amazingly good but its license is horribly stupid. 

AFAIK, what we have now in TeXLive is a Perl generated in a Mingw
(Minimum GNU for Windows) environment.  This works pretty well though
I think it would be nicer to use ActivePerl because TeXLive
developers can save a lot of time then.  

Regarding ActivePerl, I don't understand why people spend an
enormous amount of time to provide really good software and finally
put it under such a stupid license.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha			              Phone: +49-511-4592165
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