[tex-live] Binary names and TeXlive as the default UNIX TeX system (was: Fwd: Polish TexLive Stuff)

Frank Küster frank at kuesterei.ch
Tue Dec 19 08:58:47 CET 2006


karl at freefriends.org (Karl Berry) wrote:

>     But then you can no longer argue with "binaries are in a separate
>     tree", since it won't be correct for these cases.
>
> I know.  I didn't say that.  I said for "standard TL".  And that is true
> and will remain true.  
>
>     I think TeXlive development should keep this in mind and try to be "a
>     good citizen", 
>
> Again, of course.  Who said anything about not being a "good citizen"?

No one - but what I understood from your mail was:  In "standard TL",
the binaries are in a separate tree => there is no need to care about
filename clashes.

This is only true for "standard TL", and "nonstandard TL" is getting
more and more common.  Therefore I think this argument is quite weak,
and I wouldn't use it.

> We'll all try to do what's best on a case-by-case basis.  Which is not
> to say that agreement will always be possible.

As was the case here, but it seems it's also not needed much.  If the
Debian octave folks can simply rename their binary to mex2.1 (there'll
probably be a mex2.2 or whatever in the future), this seems to indicate
that it is mainly called indirectly by scripts which can be changed.
Therefore this solution should be equally applicable to other
distributions. 

> In fact, one thing in this regard that I am concerned about is the
> plethora of executables that are part of tex4ht, many of which have
> short (and opaque) names.  I have refrained from installing them for
> precisely the fear of path conflicts, but it would be nice to be able to
> install everything that Eitan intends.  

The separate Debian tex4ht package only installs

/usr/bin/ht
/usr/bin/htlatex
/usr/bin/httex
/usr/bin/httexi
/usr/bin/mk4ht
/usr/bin/t4ht
/usr/bin/tex4ht

> Can you check the listing at
> rsync://tug.org/tldevsrc/Build/source/texk/tex4htk/ and see if any of
> the executables have conflicts?  (Even if they don't have conflicts I'm
> not sure we should install them, but it would be nice to know.)

I'll try to do that later, and/or ask Kapil, the Debian maintainer of
tex4ht. 

Regards, Frank
-- 
Dr. Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)


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