[tex-live] Comment on Re: TeXLive-CD/DVD (Installation)

Hans Hagen pragma at wxs.nl
Wed May 23 19:23:36 CEST 2007


David Kastrup wrote:
> "George N. White III" <gnwiii at gmail.com> writes:
>
>   
>> On 5/22/07, Nelson H. F. Beebe <beebe at math.utah.edu> wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> If a simple, freely-distributable, standalone POSIX shell for Windows
>>> (NT, ME, 2000, XP, VISTA, ...) could be found, along with the set of
>>>       
>> It might be possible to use the same install scripts if you allow
>> some preliminary setup on Windows, but there would likely be some
>> annoying constraints on the way the *x scripts must be written.
>> Even with the best intentions, it is hard to be disciplined if you
>> don't actually use the installer on Windows (or anywhere else).
>> Testing would be impractical if the Windows install ties up a
>> machine for half a day.
>>     
>
> Part of my experiences in that respect are that a large part of the
> workload for getting a Windows-usable installer is to write a correct
> one for *x which is surprisingly hard to do.  No sane person will
> under *x use filenames with spaces and other special characters in
> them.
>   
hm, this qualifies all osx users as insane as well as users from content 
management systems running on *ix or just simple users like me who store 
music collections (with titles and such having special chars) on a unix nas
> Under Windows, a _default_ location for many things is "Documents and
> Settings".  Uh.  Or "My Programs".
>   
can you guarantee that on a unix machine (say edubuntu) users will not 
use a gui and create files and paths with spaces
> And the directory separator under Windows needs to get escaped to
> shells.  Ugh.
>   
new to me ; escaping in general is a pain, whatever platform is used
> This is slowly changing with the spread of GUIs and file managers and
> desktop environments (instead of command line interfaces) where people
> can create terrible file names effortlessly.
>   
i consider consistently mixed case, multple spaces, funny suffixes are 
more of a problem than an occasional space (although i try to avoid 
spaces in filenames as much as possible you cannot expect that from 
users for who computers are just a tool and want it to do what they 
expect it to do without the need to make hacking a hobby)

so, we should just handle it or conclude that tex can only be used in a 
strictly defined environment

(btw, the windows versions of tex can already handle spaces in names for 
many years)

Hans


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