[texworks] Bug report

[Stefan Löffler]

On 2017-04-24 13:58, Norbert Preining wrote:
>> Can you try without python?
> Indeed, removing texworks-scripting-python packages (the Debian
> packages shipping the scripting extensions) made TW answer to Ctrl-C
> again.
>
> Interesting.
>
> So you suggest *not* to build the python extension anymore ... hmmm ...
> need to think about it how to deal with that in Debian.

IIRC, on Linux it picks up the system's interpreter (not sure which
version though if both python2 and python3 are installed; maybe the one
symlinked to python?). So it should work fine, I guess. The problem on
other platforms (especially Windows) was that Python is not (easily)
available by default, so there we tried to provide Python ourselves
(using our default MXE approach [1] which uses static builds). That
resulted in a (rather unfriendly, as I recall) discussion with some
Python devs that that is "abuse" of the python framework (I'm
paraphrasing here). Also, it would be bound to cause problems with
python packages (that would not be picked up or lead to conflicts) and
generally could interfere with whatever python interpreter might be
installed. Long story short, since I found no info on how to do things
"the right way" and noone else offered any advice, I decided to
discontinue python support until those problems were resolved. FWIW, I
am not aware of any scripts that use anything other than the built-in
QtScript framework ATM, so I don't think it matters much.

So, the official policy is that using python is discouraged and not
actively supported ("use at your own risk" ;)). You can build it, if you
want (and can live with the Ctrl-C interception and possible other side
effects), or you can discontinue it. One practical option would be to
mark the 0.6.2 texworks as conflicting with texworks-scripting-python <
0.6.2. That way you could build a new version of the plugin if you want
(e.g. at a later time) but could get rid of old builds of it.

All the best,
Stefan


[1] http://mxe.cc/