[tex-live] Bug in TexLive 2005 and 2007? Non-writable aux-file

Hans Hagen pragma at wxs.nl
Sun Mar 11 19:01:52 CET 2007


David Kastrup wrote:
> Taco Hoekwater <taco at elvenkind.com> writes:
>
>   
>> David Kastrup wrote:
>>     
>>> This is basically a single application on a single operating system
>>> phenomenon (Acrobat reader on Windows).
>>>       
>> Near everybody in the real world out there uses Windows (either
>> by choice or because of policy decisions), and almost all of those
>> users use Acrobat reader to look at PDFs.
>>
>> The Reader is a badly designed program, but unless you know of an
>> alternative that can display PDFs with the same quality and same
>> extensive feature set, we are stuck with it.
>>     
>
> I think it makes no sense to design a user interface that makes
> dealing with a single program on a single platform easier.  If we want
> to accommodate a single program, the solution is to use the DDC (or
> whatever they are called) interfaces to the _program_ and close and
> reopen the viewed file automatically, rather than redesigning the
> interface to the human because of that single-use case and pretend
> that it is a generally sane approach.
>
>   

to me a file bing locked for writing is not that weird a concept, and 
although it happens to be the case on windows with acrobat, it might as 
well happen with unix when there had been a viewer that does some 
caching (not unthinkcable for 400 mb files) or wants users to signal 
that an opened files to be overwritten. If you wonder why ... on some 
occasions acrobat will repair a damaged file and may ask a user to save 
the repaired file first which also will lock the file; talking of 
locking ... even another (pending or aborted) tex job can have a pdf 
file open ...

and, as taco mentions ... there is a lange amount of users out there on 
windows   

anyway, why do we always end up with  discussing non relevant operating 
system issues on this list

if the openers/writers in web2c cannot be made to distinguish between 
file types (in particular the output file) then that should be fixed, 
and we should not hide ourselved beyond generic 
openeres/writers/shared_code.  

Hans


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