[tex-live] Re: commercial TeXs

[Hans Hagen]

George N. White III wrote:

> 1. more attention to the tools that allow multiple TeX distro's to
>    coexist.  On unix the environment-modules tools provide a simple
>    mechanism to adjust environments and paths in an organized way.
>    This lets you do:
>
> $ module list
> Currently Loaded Modulefiles:
>           1) modules       2) SGI_fw        3) TeX/TL2003
> $ pdflatex sample2e
> This is pdfeTeXk, Version 3.141592-1.11b-2.1 (Web2C 7.5.2)
> [...]
> $ mkdir TL2003
> $ mv *.log *.pdf *.aux TL2003
> $ module switch TeX/TL2003 TeX/teTeX3
> Switching 'TeX/TL2003' to 'TeX/teTeX3'...ok.
> $ pdflatex sample2e
> This is pdfeTeX, Version 3.141592-1.20a-rc3-2.1 (Web2C 7.5.3)
> [...]
> $ diff sample2e.log TL2003/sample2e.log
>
>    Is there a similar tool for Win32?

hm, i need to look into that; probably under 2000/xp local environments 
are possible;

currently i use a simple bat/sh file, something

setuptex /someplace/sometree

and that works ok for unix as well as windows

> 2. a gui search tool for texmf trees that would let you choose the
>    filetype, progname, etc. from lists.

+ info about what that file is

> 3. tools to maintain/debug texmf trees.  A lot of the magic would go
>    away if users had better information about the status of their
>    texmf trees.

indeed, maybe something for the new kpse library

>    There should be a sort of checkpointing for the texmf trees to allow
>    installing new versions and backing out if problems occur.  Keeping
>    texmf-dist as a read-only tree will help, but it would be useful to
>    have tools to
>
>    a.  list changes from the installation
>    b.  list duplicate filenames
>    c.  checkpoint a tree
>    d.  restore a tree to a previous checkpoint
>    e.  compare two trees

something for the new kpse lib as well (if it can load multiple trees ...)

-- 
Hans

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