[tex-live] texdoc under windows

[Reinhard Kotucha]

George N. White III writes:

 > I don't think the texdoctk.dat file is being maintained, so in
 > TL2007 many documents are not found.  The majority are .dvi -->
 > .pdf, but some have changed names/locations.

Yes, unfortunately it is unmaintained.  It had been designed for
teTeX, which is significantly smaller than TeXLive.  Even there,
maintaining the database was a lot of work.  But for TeXLive it is
unmaintainable.

However, though I definitely refuse to take over maintenance, I will
at least try to fix bugs regarding the database reported by users as
good as I can.  That means that I will care about files which are not
found and about new packages which are important.  But I do not intend
to make the database complete.

Sending me a list of all packages which are not supported by texdoctk
does not make any sense.  I can create such a list myself but I refuse
spend that much much time on texdoctk.

 > You might look into using msys to run texdoc on Windows, but some
 > effort may be needed to get it working.

texdoc is a UNIX shell script.  Maybe it works on Windows in a MinGW
environment.  At the moment it seems that some UNIX guys are quite
unhappy with texdoc.  I don't know whether anybody thinks about
writing texdoc from scratch.  Maybe it should be ported to Perl, which
is provided by TeXLive for Windows already.

However, there is even a much better choice:  At the moment I'm
experimenting with texlua, the stand-alone Lua interpreter from the
LuaTeX project.  texlua has the kpse tables compiled in, that means
that it is much more platform independent than Perl.  

For instance, in texlua you can say

    path = kpse.expand_braces ("$TEXMF")

but in Perl you have to use the system command which requires that you
have to find out first on which platform you are in order to decide
whether you have to quote the dollar sign or not.

If anyone wants to translate Thomas' shell scripts to another language
or intends to write something from scratch, texlua is definitely the
best choice.

In TeXLive-2008 we will have LuaTeX, and texlua is currently just a
symlink to LuaTeX.

In my opinion, if someone intends to port shell scripts to some other
language, using texlua is definitely the best way to proceed.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha			              Phone: +49-511-4592165
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