New ghostscript/ghostpdl release candidate

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2024-02-22 at 10:52:57 -0700, Nelson H. F. Beebe wrote:

 > I just received news on the gs-devel at ghostscript.com list about a
 > new release candidate:
 >
 > 	https://github.com/ArtifexSoftware/ghostpdl-downloads/releases/tag/gs10030rc1

Dear Nelson,
thank you for the announcement.

Let me add that TeX Live provides Ghostscript only for Windows.
Because its sole purpose is to support scripts shipped with TeX Live,
some stuff was removed, see

  https://tug.org/svn/texlive/trunk/Master/tlpkg/tlgs/README.TEXLIVE

Maybe we should mention the removal of Tesseract there too.

If Windows users need Ghostscript for anything else (printer driver,
OCR,...) they have to install an external Ghostscript themselves.

TeX Live's Ghostscript binaries are not in PATH and thus do not
interfere with external installations.  Because there are no usable
symlinks on Windows all scripts have to be launched by wrappers.
These wrappers add the location of the GS executables to PATH and
sanitize the environment before a script is executed.  This means
that all scripts in texmf-dist which are invoked via symlinks in
<platform>/bin/ on Unix have Ghostscript temporarily in PATH on
Windows.

We replaced the wrappers, originally written in C by Fabrice Popineau,
by a Lua script in order to make things more maintainable on Unix.
Now things can be changed without the need for recompilation on
Windows.  When Tomasz M. Trzeciak got involved he thankfully added
comments to the script which explain in detail how these wrappers
work:

  https://tug.org/svn/texlive/trunk/Master/bin/windows/runscript.tlu

These wrappers help us to make sure that TeX Live works the same way
on all systems, which is IMO a must.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha                            Phone: +49-511-3373112
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