[tlbuild] Building an embedded tex/latex for a ruby gem.

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Sun, May 5, 2013 at 3:32 PM, Norbert Preining wrote:
> Hi Jason,
>
> this is a mailing list for the builders of binaries for the TeX Live
> distribution. I am now since quite some time in the business of TeX Live,
> and I have absolutely no idea what you want to ask us. So either
> rephrase, or write to a different mailing list.

My guess is that the author wants to process (La)TeX in ruby (reasons
might vary, for example to be able to create PDF documents from LaTeX
code in a web application). One can easily install a library to do
that (gem install whatever-the-tex-package-is-called), but needs to
install TeX (Live) separately. My guess is that the author would want
the package (gem in ruby jargon) to install some ("embedded") TeX
distribution automatically without having to install TeX Live
separately.

But in case I'm right - yes, this is the wrong mailing list to request
the creation of a ruby package. If you want to develop one yourself,
you can get help with questions related to building the binaries and
possibly related to specifics of creating a tex distribution yourself,
but keep in mind that:
- The whole TeX Live distribution takes a few GB (you can also install
smaller components only)
- If you would want to compile binaries as part of installation,
building them takes anywhere from 20 min to 5 hours depending on the
speed of the machine, but I believe that pre-compiled binaries should
work
- It's a large amount of work (depending on what you might want to
achieve; it took years and years before some linux distributions
switched from tetex to TeX Live; I created a small distribution for
ConTeXt from TeX Live in a few days, but it doesn't support LaTeX and
related tools which made the work easier).
- Probably the easiest thing to do would be to make the gem just a
wrapper which would call the original TeX Live installer in the
background and set the paths so that ruby tools would be able to find
and execute the binaries.
- It depends on one's motivation and knowledge, but the amount of work
needed by the developer to create a gem might not even justify the
cumulative time spared by users who would otherwise need to install
TeX Live on their own (unless it provides additional functionality).

For any ruby & ruby packaging related questions you cannot expect much
help on the tex-related mailing lists. Also, if you need further help,
this also isn't the most appropriate list. I would suggest you to try
asking also on tex.stackexchange.com, or on some other list (not sure
which one; maybe just "tex-live" on the same server) if you intend to
try to build a "distribution" or a package to install tex live
automatically *yourself*. If you are seeking for someone to create it
for you, the chances are close-to-zero, both because there are hardly
any hard core ruby developers here and because most people consider
installing TeX Live as easy enough compared to all other development
that needs to be done to create some nice & useful ruby application.

(I apologize if I missed the point of the original question.)

Mojca

> On Fr, 03 Mai 2013, Jason Kenney wrote:
>> I've noticed the few really old ruby-latex gems out there simply hope that the latex executable is on the system path. I would prefer if possible to have gem installation also install the executables and tex packages needed. This would make migrations and maintenance very easy. Any suggestions on where to start?