[tex-live] Gow

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 1 August 2010 Robert Eckl wrote:

 > Hi Reinhard,
 > 
 > Reinhard Kotucha wrote: 
 > >
 > >Could anybody install Gow (at least the programs ln and ls) and tell me
 > whether this works:
 > >
 > >  1. cd /path/to/texlive/20xx/bin/win32
 > >
 > >  2. del pdflatex.exe
 > >
 > >  3. ln -s pdftex.exe pdflatex.exe 
 > >
 > >  4. pdflatex --version
 > >
 > My result is:
 >    MiKTeX-pdfTeX 2.8.3759 (1.40.10) (MiKTeX 2.8)
 >    Copyright (C) 1982 D. E. Knuth, (C) 1996-2006 Han The Thanh
 >    TeX is a trademark of the American Mathematical Society.
 > 
 > This means, pdflatex in the current directory is not found, it is
 > found in PATH (behind TeXLives PATH)

Hi Robert,
thank you very much for testing.  The information you provided is
very useful.  I fear that .exe.lnk files are useless if .exe files
are found first even if they appear later in PATH.  I tend to assume
that this problem isn't solvable.

 > >And what is the result of "ls -l pdflatex"?  Do you see something
 > like "pdflatex -> pdftex"?
 > >
 > ls: pdflatex: No such file or directory

Ok, Gow's ls obviously doesn't circumvent the M$ extension craziness.
Cygwin obviously does.
 
 > but ls -l pdflatex* results to
 > 
 > lr--r--r--  1 Robert 0 529 2010-07-31 23:24 pdflatex.exe.lnk ->
 > H:/texlive/2010/bin/win32/pdftex.exe

I would expect a relative link here.  Either Microsoft doesn't support
relative paths in .lnk files or it's a bug in Gow's ln command.  

Absolute paths are not acceptable because they make TeX Live
non-relocatable, which is very painful if you install it on a
USB~stick which is assigned to different "drive letters" on different
machines.

 > and then:
 > 
 > pdflatex.exe.lnk --version  results to
 > 
 > pdfTeX 3.1415926-1.40.11-2.2 (Web2C 2010)
 > [...]

I suppose that "pdflatex --version" works if there's no other TeX
distribution in PATH. 

 > >Don't be worried if it doesn't work.  You can always restore
 > >pdflatex.exe: 
 > >
 > >  cd /path/to/texlive/20xx/bin/win32
 > >  copy /b pdftex.exe pdflatex.exe
 > >
 > First, it wasn´t possible to delete the link. But i could solve it.

I encountered such problems too.
 
 > My system is WIN XP 5.1.2600 (home), AFAIK with all SPs.
 > 
 > Another try
 > 
 > ln -s -S=exe pdftex.exe pdflatex
 > 
 > this results to pdflatex.lnk
 > 
 > All the links in the explorer are shown without the suffix .lnk  

I fear that it doesn't matter whether it's .exe.lnk or .lnk because
it's very likely that Windows looks for .exe files first in all PATH
components.

A clear specification of the .lnk file format and the search strategy
would be very helpful but I didn't find anything in the internet.
What I've found is what someone else reverse engineered:

  http://www.stdlib.com/art6-Shortcut-File-Format-lnk.html

It seems that relative links are possible.  But the main problem is
the search order of executable files in PATH.

At a first glance it looked quite promising.  Symlinks really make
life easier.  They are much more user-friendly than the stubs we
currently have but I fear that we have to live with them in the future.

Robert, thank you very much.  I'm glad that *you* tested it because
you have more than one TeX installation on your machine and thus
detected a problem which we hadn't noticed otherwise.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha			              Phone: +49-511-3373112
Marschnerstr. 25
D-30167 Hannover	                      mailto:reinhard.kotucha at web.de
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Microsoft isn't the answer. Microsoft is the question, and the answer is NO.
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