[tex-live] [NTG-pdftex] Runtime limitations on open files?

[David Kastrup]

Hans Hagen <pragma at wxs.nl> writes:

> Martin Schröder wrote:
>> 2007/8/17, Akira Kakuto <kakuto at fsci.fuk.kindai.ac.jp>:
>>> I've confirmed that by
>>>
>>> #if defined(pdfTeX) || defined(luaTeX)
>>>   _setmaxstdio(2048);
>>> #endif
>>>
>>> 2041 files in
>>> Vladimir's example are included. Probably 7 are stdin, ... etc.
>> 
>> And I claim that this is a Windows-only problem that doesn't appear
>> on Unix. ;-)
>
> I'm pretty fed up with these windows rants and 'no problem on unix'
> kind of crap ... and i also much disliked the tone of mails posted
> to the lua list about this problem suggesting that it's a windows
> problem etc etc and suggesting that it's near to impssible to
> compile something on windows ... a fact that is proven wrong by
> fabrice and akira

"near to impossible", "easy", "trivial": those are synonyms only for
mathematicians.  And counterexamples just prove "not impossible".

I have in this thread described that supporting Windows installations
has proven to be _the_ major developer tiedown for the company I am
working in for most of the last 6 months, and that it has proven to be
a major developer resource hog for AUCTeX (which I am maintainer of)
as well.

Nobody lists the names of people who managed to compile TeXlive on
Unix.  It is not actually an achievement worth noting, in particular
on the rather Posix-compliant free Unix variants/clones.

The README in TeXlive contains no build instructions for Windows.

> (anyhow, it's no problem to macro program around the problem, either
> by using immediate flushing (if remember right one solution was to
> close 1-page docs afterwards because it's the multipage docs that
> complicate things but i dunno what's left of that patch) and/or do a
> multipass job)

Again, "no problem" and "conceivably possible" are the same mostly for
mathematicians.

In the mean time, there remains the problem that the number of open
files permitted by the C library is much more limited on our Windows
compilations than technically mandated, and I propose that this be
fixed, regardless of whether or not other platforms don't exhibit this
behavior.

-- 
David Kastrup