[texworks] Ubuntu packages

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 23 juin 09 à 01:51, Karl Berry a écrit :

> Obviously the binaries have to be distro-specific because of the  
> shared
> library insanity.  We already concluded that.  I'm talking about  
> making
> the binaries available from TW as well as whatever the distros do.

Something about this seems incompatible with UI-centric systems such  
as Mac OS or Windows, but I've posted messages on this already and  
nobody answered, so I imagine I must be misunderstanding something  
basic somewhere.

If I interpret this correctly, you're speaking of providing a TeXworks  
binary inside the binary directory of TeXLive, such as /usr/texbin on  
the Mac, right? But these directories are normally invisible to the  
user, who only sees what's shown by the Finder on Mac OS X, by Windows  
Explorer on Windows and something similar I imagine on Linux in Gnome  
or KDE.

It's of course possible to navigate to these directories by opening a  
terminal window and using the command line, but the average user is  
not supposed to know or be willing to do this. The only thing the  
average user knows is what can be double-clicked in Finder, Windows  
Explorer or similar.

So I don't see well how TeXworks binaries in TeXLive could fit within  
this.

There are of course some Mac ports of software of Linux origin, like  
ClamXav, which work by installing the Linux binaries in /usr/local  
(invisible in Finder) and a front end to them in /Applications  
(visible in Finder). But so far this is how TeXShop and TeXworks work  
already, as front ends to the binaries from /usr/texbin.

Otherwise the vast majority of Mac ports of Linux software (like OOo  
or Gimp or Inkscape or Scilab) are available as .app application  
bundles, to be put in /Applications and containing the Linux  
components inside the bundle itself (for example Inkscape.app/Contents/ 
Resources/bin/inkscape-bin et.).

Again, there must be something basic I'm misunderstanding here.

Bruno Voisin