[tex-live] ebong

[George N. White III]

On Sat, Jan 15, 2011 at 9:10 PM, Reinhard Kotucha
<reinhard.kotucha at web.de> wrote:
> On 15 January 2011 Robin Fairbairns wrote:
>
>  > Philip Taylor (Webmaster, Ret'd) <P.Taylor at rhul.ac.uk> wrote:
>  >
>  > > Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
>  > >
>  > > > You can install Python under Windows.  People usually have to install
>  > > > it on every other platform too.
>  > >
>  > > Is it sold by Microsoft ?  I don't like installing open-source
>  > > software that I can't trust :-)
>  >
>  > ho ho.  very satirical.

Very common attitude in large organizations where a security breach
can be a career ending event unless you can point the blame elsewhere.
  Open source is only for people who know what they are doing.

>  > what's your aim in trying to use tex live?  is it to get tex-related
>  > work done, or is it to complain that people use new-fangled languages
>  > that muckrocruft are trying to ignore?
>  >
>  > there really is no point in the latter, whatever.
>
> Phil only uses software he trusts, i.e. software sold by Masosoft or
> software recommended by Sebastian.
>
> I must admit that I'm not overly happy with scripts written in
> languages other than Perl or texlua.  Perl is already installed on all
> Unix systems because many system tools depend on it.  Thus, it's
> sufficient to ship a Perl for Windows with TeX Live.

May cause problems with other packages that also include perl and
adjust the PATH accordingly.

> Python might be installed on Unix systems or not.  Some Linux
> distributions depend on it because their package managers are, at
> least partly, written in Python.  TeX Live contains scripts written in
> Ruby, Bourne shell syntax, and so on. With this in mind one could
> claim that Windows users are not discriminated because Unix users have
> to install at least Ruby and maybe Python too.

On linux there usually distro packages for all these.

> On the other hand, when we discussed how to write a new installer for
> TeX Live, we came to the conclusion that we have to provide a Perl for
> Windows because we thought that people expect that things work
> out-of-the-box.  We could as well tell Windows users to install Perl
> before, but we deliberately wanted the TeX Live installer being
> self-contained.
>
> Regarding all the scripts provided by TeX Live, I fully agree with
> Phil's complaints, though the TeX Live team isn't responsible for the
> mess.
>
> I assume that everybody who uploads a program to CTAN is aware that
> TeX Live doesn't support anything but Perl and texlua, and that MiKTeX
> doesn't even support Perl.
>
> We already have Bourne shell scripts in TeX Live and the author
> recommends to install Cygwin in order to run these scripts under
> Windows.  Urghhh!
>
> Anyway, TeX Live itself is supposed to work out-of-the-box on all
> platforms, but it's impossible to control what people upload to CTAN.
> I can only recommend to write scripts either in Perl or texlua if they
> are supposed to work out-of-the-box in TeX Live, texlua is preferred
> if they should work in MiKTeX too.
>
> I agree with Phil that it's unfortunate if people have to install
> external software in order to run programs which are part of TeX Live.
> But as far as TeX Live itself is concerned, I think that we spent a
> vast amount of time already in order to make sure that it works on all
> platforms in the same way.  What people upload to CTAN is another
> story, and the TeX Live team has no influence.

I don't agree -- someone thinking about uploading to CTAN has to consider
whether the tool will be useful to others and how many problem reports they will
get if it doesn't work.   Knowing that texlua will avoid some of the
platorm-specific
problems may be enough to encourage contributers to use texlua instead of their
previous favorite scripting language.

> I can only recommend to write scripts in texlua.  texlua scripts are
> completely platform independent and not restricted to TeX Live, they
> work under MiKTeX as well.



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