[tex-live] ebong

Reinhard Kotucha reinhard.kotucha at web.de
Wed Jan 19 14:55:49 CET 2011


On 19 January 2011 George N. White III wrote:

 > On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 7:28 PM, Reinhard Kotucha
 > <reinhard.kotucha at web.de> wrote:
 > 
 > > On 18 January 2011 George N. White III wrote:
 > >
 > >  > On Sat, Jan 15, 2011 at 9:10 PM, Reinhard Kotucha
 > >  > <reinhard.kotucha at web.de> wrote:
 > >  > >
 > >  > > I must admit that I'm not overly happy with scripts written in
 > >  > > languages other than Perl or texlua.  Perl is already installed
 > >  > > on all Unix systems because many system tools depend on
 > >  > > it.  Thus, it's sufficient to ship a Perl for Windows with TeX
 > >  > > Live.
 > >  >
 > >  > May cause problems with other packages that also include perl and
 > >  > adjust the PATH accordingly.
 > >
 > > Did you encounter such problems yourself?  By default, the TeX Live
 > > wrappers make sure that only the Perl shipped with TL is found by
 > > the scripts they launch,  You'll find more information in
 > >
 > >  bin/win32/runscript.tlu
 > 
 > That is fIne for scripts included with TL, but users want to run
 > scripts they have written (e.g., to extract records from a database
 > and write a latex table) or found on the internet (CTAN or elsewhere).
 >  You can't be sure all the add-ons used by such scripts are present in
 > TL. Users may have been told to install a specific perl version and
 > run "perl some_scripy.pl", but
 > not how to check which of multiple perl interpreters on the system is
 > being used.  A the first
 > sign of trouble those users will copy the .pl script out of TL and try
 > "perl some_tl_script.pl".

I know what you mean.  But TeX Live doesn't add its Perl to PATH.
Thus, this Perl is completely invisible to any Perl script which is
not part of TL.  You have to install an external Perl for your own
scripts.

The other way round, an external Perl is invisible to scripts shipped
with TeX Live, at least by default.

 > I rarely use windows, but colleagues (who tend to work in large
 > multi-author projects with authors from different labs and on
 > different systems) 

Sorry, I thought you are maintaining the Windows clients too, here is
a link:

 http://www.tug.org/svn/texlive/trunk/Master/bin/win32/runscript.tlu

 > too often have problems of the sort where one author can't build
 > the document on their system.  The windows users tend to use MiKTeX
 > these days, so I don't hear of problems with TL on WIndows.  A few
 > years ago the perl scripts in context were a huge source of such
 > problems (maybe those are no longer needed) -- I wouldn't know as
 > recent projects are mostly using latex.

This has nothing to do with the ConTeXt scripts.  Until 2007 the Perl
shipped with TeX Live was installed in PATH by the installer, so that
clashes couldn't be avoided.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha                                      Phone: +49-511-3373112
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