[XeTeX] Porting XeTeX

[Jonathan Kew]

On 14 Mar 2008, at 5:26 am, jeremiah johnson wrote:

> I'm not terribly knowledgeable in the ways of C/C++ compilation,  
> but I would imagine that you could cross-compile to Plan 9 from a  
> platform that can compile XeTeX.

I don't know if there's a cross-compiler available that would target  
Plan 9, but I'm confident that cross-compilation won't work "out of  
the box"; it would take a fair amount of effort to get everything  
configured right.

> Is it terribly important that this run on Plan 9?  If not, I'd just  
> run XeTeX on a supported system.  It was only recently that XeTeX  
> was made to run on Windows, the most popular operating system on  
> Earth,

It's been available for Windows since June 2006 (with Akira's  
W32TeX), which isn't particularly recent (at least in XeTeX terms).  
It also shipped as part of TeX Live 2007, over a year ago now.  
Inclusion in MikTeX is considerably more recent; perhaps that's what  
you had in mind?

> and it still isn't really supported, to my knowledge.

I don't support the Windows implementations personally, if that's  
what you mean, as I don't have the facilities to build or debug them  
myself. But AFAIK they're in widespread use, and the maintainers of  
those distributions are actively supporting them.

>   Plan 9 support could be a ways off.

Given the apparent lack of C++ support there, I suspect that's very  
true.

JK