[tex-live] texlive for win64

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 16 November 2009 SUN Wenchang wrote:

 > When will a 64-bit windows version of tex executalbes appear?

Hi Wenchang,
you can be happy that there are 32-bit executables for Windows at all.
You can't imagine how hard some people worked in order to make this
possible.  Without Akira there wouldn't be any Windows binaries at
all, and without his help and patience, and Staszek's persistency,
it's impossible to support Windows in TeX Live.

tlmgr and the installer (and all the stuff behind them) were written
from scratch.  At the beginning we thought that it's possible to
provide elegant, efficient, maintainable, platform-independent Perl
code.  But Siep and Norbert (I don't have Windows and am not willing
to spend money for it) encountered some severe Windows bugs quite soon
and it took a lot of time to find out what's going on.  Microsoft
doesn't document bugs.  Windows users have to investigate themselves. 

What we have now is a conglomeratioan of workarounds, which are
significantly less efficient, less maintainable, and elegency of code
turned out to be a dream quite soon.  Life could be so much easier
without Windows.

Wenchang, 
you are asking for 64-bit binaries for Windows.  I don't object if
anybody is willing to provide and maintain them.  But are you aware
that there is currently only ***one*** person ***worldwide*** who is
able to compile TeX Live on Windows?

Every schoolboy can compile all the TeX Live binaries on a Unix
platform of his choice, even if he doesn't know anything about
computers or programming languages at all.  But on Windows, everything
is a pain.

Volunteers are welcome, masochists are preferred.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha			              Phone: +49-511-3373112
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Microsoft isn't the answer. Microsoft is the question, and the answer is NO.
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