[tex-live] Add include and lib directories to TeX live?

[Karl Berry]

    Sure, but it's a lot easier to write installation instructions if I
    can just say "install this package" 

Understood, though of course you're not obligated to write installation
instructions to cover all cases (or at all).  In fact, I don't think it
would be remotely feasible to do so.  Getting Perl (or anything) to
dynamically load a shared library in a nonstandard location is
inherently a complicated, error-prone, painful operation.  Doing it in a
way that is portable in any way at all (across OS versions, across Perl
versions, across kpse versions) seems impossible to me.

    is that it was more than just connecting to the kpathsea directory
    in the texlive source code directory and then typing configure and
    make.

Indeed, it is more than that.  What I would suggest, for right now, is
linking to the manual that Peter (mainly) wrote about building TeX Live
-- http://tug.org/texlive/doc/tlbuild.html.

We don't have an exact recipe in there for building just kpathsea as a
shared library, but we could add it.  That's what a user of native TL
will have to do, as things stand.  (There's an example for building a
single program at
http://tug.org/texlive/doc/tlbuild.html#Build-one-package; building the
one library would be similar, though of course devil+details ...)

Of course, it's going to be up to the user to install it (somewhere),
and get your bindings to see it (somehow).  We can't document that part.

    I assume you mean Linux distributions?

And BSD, and third-party collections for Solaris/whatever, etc.

    > So most users would like your bindings to work with those
    > libraries, rather than anything that could come with TL.

    That's not clear to me, 

Just FWIW ... from eyeballing support requests in various forums, my
sense is that a large proportion of people use miktex; of those who use
gnu/linux, my impression is that more use what their distro provides
than the native tl.  Perhaps the single largest group using native tl
are on macs using mactex.  Just my feeling.

(In an attempt to forestall the usual follow-ups at this point: I know
of no feasible way to gather reliable statistics on this perennial
question.  Lots of ways to gather unreliable statistics, but ... :)

Do you have a different feeling from what's incoming to AMS?
Just curious.

    but it's moot.

Ack :).

k