[tex-live] dates

[Staszek Wawrykiewicz]

On Sun, 21 Jan 2007, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:

> It's a pity that everything will be frozen now because texmf.cnf for
> Windows is completely broken at the moment.  I don't know what can be
> done because, though I made several suggestions, I did not get any
> response from Staszek.

Reinhard, please don't panic. I read your mails carefully.
 
> getnonfreefonts will definitely not work anymore because TEXMFHOME had
> been removed from TEXMF.  This had been done deliberately in order to
> break getnonfreefonts but I don't know whether other programs are
> affected too.
> 
> Currently TeXLive-2007 is a mixture between a per-user and a
> system-wide installation.  All *-sys programs had been removed but
> there is still a TEXMFLOCAL directory (which is supposed to contain
> files provided by an administrator) but not a TEXMFHOME (which is
> supposed to contain files provided by a user).

Sorry, nobody had removed "all *-sys programs", as they never existed
on Windows.
 
> The problem was TEXMFHOME = $HOME/texmf and that $HOME is usually not
> set on Windows.
> 
> I provided a lot of suggestions how to set TEXMFHOME to something
> reasonable but none of them had been acceptable for Staszek.
> 
> He preferred to remove TEXMFHOME from TEXMF for no good reason.  He
> even did not reply to my mails.

As I wrote several times, HOME is not set in Windows and/or can be
differently interpreted on different Windows versions.
So TEXMFHOME can/should be set to the absolute path manualy only by the 
user.
I'm still trying to find any good solution, but I feel left somehow
alone, as nobody from Windows users wants to give me a help. Reinhard, 
sorry, you are not Windows user, but I really appreciate your effort
to make things working also on Windows.
As I wrote you, I removed (temporarily) TEXMFHOME from the TEXMF 
declaration only because it makes confussion for the _users_ eg. while 
running mktexlsr, but _not only_ (soory, I have no time to explain
all consequences).

> It's a pity to see that things evolved like this.  I spent an enormous
> amount of time to make sure TeXLive works on Windows reasonably.  But
> I'm quite disappointed now and in the future I'll only care about
> things I use myself.
> 
> Sorry, but I don't understand why things are broken deliberately.
> 
> Proceed as you want, I'll forward all bug reports concerning
> getnbonfreefonts to Staszek.  He is the guy who broke it
> ***deliberately***. 
> 
> In the future, if people report problems, I'll point them to MikTeX or
> Akira's W32-TeX because the Windows port of TeXLive is not a
> TeXLive-like system and had been broken deliberately.  People can
> avoid a lot of headaches if they install something better instead.

Ahhh, why so sad? I suggested you to use TEXMFLOCAL for
getnonfreefonts.bat, as TEXMFLOCAL is easily set on Windows and even
current installer prepares such directory. Please observe, that _only_
getnonfreefonts demands/forces existing TEXMFHOME set (on win32) at the 
moment. Of course, I can make you happy and set TEXMFHOME=$TEXMFLOCAL
as you suggested, but I still need some more time for rethinking, 
testing, but not spending the time on writing all the above (yes, it takes 
most of my time to answer all urgent mails).

Friendly,

-- 
Staszek Wawrykiewicz
StaW at gust.org.pl