[tlbuild] problems with synctex - warning to others

[Richard Koch]

Folks,

I just finished testing the Macintosh portion of the DVD, where all is well, and thought "done for 2018"
when this message appeared. I haven't had time to digest it, hence the material below may be nonsense,
but for what it's worth:

1) Jerome Laurens introduced significant changes to synctex at the very end of the construction of TeX Live 2017.
When that happened, syncing in TeXShop failed.  One of the things Jerome provides is C source for a parser which front ends can use. I switched to his new parser and that fixed TeXShop last year.

2) I just tested this synctex in TeXShop with the version of TeX on the current DVD for 2018 and it continues to work.

3) However, last August a ConTeXt user wrote me saying that synctex no longer worked in ConTeXT. I tested,
and sure enough the OLD pre-2017 parser worked fine, but the NEW 2017 parser failed. The ConTeXt folks then
told me that they rewrote ConTeXt synctex from scratch rather than using Jerome's code, but they made it compatible with Jerome's design. At least I think that was their message. I interpreted that as saying their material was compatible with the OLD version, not the NEW version.

4) So with enormous work I released a version of TeXShop containing both the 2016 parser and the 2017 parser. (Not easy since these pieces of code used the same variable names.) By default, TeXShop uses the 2017 parser, but ConTeXt users can switch to the 2016 parser, and they said it solved their problem.

5) Finally, looking at the SyncTeX code for this year, there is a ChangeLog dated Jan 18, 2018. It lists man page changes, but the latest code changes seem to be dated July, 2017.

Therefore, I wonder if Norbert's message is just the rest of the world catching up with these changes in 2017.

If so, I sure hope at this late date that there is no regression of synctex code. 

Dick Koch
koch at uoregon.edu







>> On Apr 18, 2018, at 5:50 PM, Norbert Preining <preining at logic.at> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi all,
>> 
>> here two warnings concerning the new synctex in 2018:
>> * it changes API without bumping so (synctex_nex_result is renamed!)
>> * synctex_version.h is not installed anymore
>> 
>> Other distributors or builders, please be aware.
>> 
>> Especially the first item is a real problem for those building shared
>> libraries.
>> 
>> I don't know how I will fix it, but in Debian it is already creating
>> havoc because all other packages depending on libsynctex just start to
>> fail to build from source, great!
>> 
>> Thanks
>> 
>> Norbert
>> 
>> --
>> PREINING Norbert                               http://www.preining.info
>> Accelia Inc.     +    JAIST     +    TeX Live     +    Debian Developer
>> GPG: 0x860CDC13   fp: F7D8 A928 26E3 16A1 9FA0 ACF0 6CAC A448 860C DC13
> 
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