[tex-live] web2c-win32 volunteer?

Olaf Weber olaf at infovore.xs4all.nl
Wed Apr 14 08:38:13 CEST 2004


Fabrice Popineau writes:

> Providing executables is not the most difficult part even if it
> tends to become a repetitive and boring task to patch sources and
> recompile.

> What's more annoying for me is that it is difficult to turn this
> stuff into a more real Windows application. There is no point to
> distribute 300 or 400 executables: their vast majority is probably never
> used.

At the web2c end, my sense is that for unix installations many of the
binaries aren't much used either.  They're there because they're a
traditional part of the whole suite of tools.  I don't see having them
be there as much of a problem.

Another issue is what it means to "turn this stuff into a more real
Windows application".  I'm note sure what the expections are, and
whether the changes it implies would be useful on other platforms as
well, without unduly restricting the range of platforms we can
support.

> On the other hand, I would like to see people getting a (La)TeX
> distribution and start to produce documents painlessly.

> Recompiling the binaries using either MSVC or MinGW is not the
> issue. The issue is : what to do with this stuff and how to present
> it to users.

> I built an MSI installer for the whole texlive. I may still provide the
> whole texlive/win32 installable from the internet thanks to this
> installer. But that won't fit with the 'regular' texlive distribution.

> Fabrice

-- 
Olaf Weber

               (This space left blank for technical reasons.)



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