[tex-live] web2c-win32 volunteer?

[George N. White III]

On Sat, 10 Apr 2004, Karl Berry wrote:

> Bad news everyone -- Fabrice has decided not to continue maintaining
> web2c-win32 (he'll keep on with his xemtex distribution with pdf and
> html output only .. which, for now, unfortunately, won't keep the
> general populace happy).  I know we all appreciate his heroic efforts to
> date in making the distribution work under Windows.  Thank you, Fabrice.

I second this.  Windows really is a hostile environment for a TeX
based on a unix distro.

> Looking to this year's TeX Live release ... I guess the first question
> is whether someone (or some group) can volunteer to take over
> maintenance of web2c-win32.  If no one can step forward here, I can ask
> on texhax/c.t.t.
>
> However, since I asked for volunteers previously merely to *help*
> Fabrice, and got no takers, I confess I don't feel too optimistic.  I'd
> love to be proved wrong, though. :)
>
> If no one volunteers to take over, the only alternative I can think of
> is to talk with Christian Schenk about distributing miktex.  One
> possibility is that TeX Collection 2004 could be one CD with Unix/Mac,
> one CD with miktex, and one DVD with both plus CTAN.

There is also teTeX on cygwin.  4AllTeX (the preferred distro of our
Win32 users for years) lagged in support for pdftex and MikTeX had
conflicts (.dll versions) with some of our other apps.  Cygwin and
teTeX was the only way to accomplish certain tasks on Win32.

> In any case, obviously miktex would not be integrated at all into the
> existing unix/mac stuff as web2c-win32 is.  We would just take it as is,
> with its own installation and packaging.  Perhaps in a future year the
> same texmf tree could be shared, but I can't picture that happening this
> time.
>
> If anyone has any other ideas, don't be shy :).

Xemtex is clearly differentiated from MikTeX.  With the exception of
ConTeXt and users who move between teTeX on *n*x and Win32, MikTeX
serves well.  I don't know if there are still people encountering
conflicts between MikTeX and other applications -- many of those apps
have either been replaced or now live on dedicated Win9x machines.

My guess is that it would not be too hard to provide Cygwin teTeX
together with *n*x and OSX, but it has been over a year since I used
Cygwin teTeX, so I don't know if there is a current port.

--
George N. White III  <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
  Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia, Canada