[tex-live] Bug in TexLive 2005 and 2007? Non-writable aux-file

David Kastrup dak at gnu.org
Sun Mar 11 19:13:24 CET 2007


Hans Hagen <pragma at wxs.nl> writes:

> David Kastrup wrote:
>> Taco Hoekwater <taco at elvenkind.com> writes:
>>   
>>> David Kastrup wrote:
>>>     
>>>> This is basically a single application on a single operating system
>>>> phenomenon (Acrobat reader on Windows).
>>>
>>> The Reader is a badly designed program, but unless you know of an
>>>alternative that can display PDFs with the same quality and same
>>>extensive feature set, we are stuck with it.     
>>
>> I think it makes no sense to design a user interface that makes
>> dealing with a single program on a single platform easier.  If we
>> want to accommodate a single program, the solution is to use the
>> DDC (or whatever they are called) interfaces to the _program_ and
>> close and reopen the viewed file automatically, rather than
>> redesigning the interface to the human because of that single-use
>> case and pretend that it is a generally sane approach.   
>
> to me a file bing locked for writing is not that weird a concept,

Well, we see the trouble we get into for that.

> and although it happens to be the case on windows with acrobat, it
> might as well happen with unix when there had been a viewer that
> does some caching (not unthinkcable for 400 mb files) or wants users
> to signal that an opened files to be overwritten.

Unix does not lock based on file names.  It locks inodes.

> and, as taco mentions ... there is a lange amount of users out there
> on windows

So why do all of you yell "bloody murder" when I propose _explicitly_
dealing with the Acrobat/Windows case, which might also improve the
Acrobat/Unixlike case?

> anyway, why do we always end up with discussing non relevant
> operating system issues on this list

Because they are relevant to the user?

> if the openers/writers in web2c cannot be made to distinguish
> between file types (in particular the output file) then that should
> be fixed, and we should not hide ourselved beyond generic
> openeres/writers/shared_code.

Who is talking about "generic openers"?  I was proposing dealing with
the special Acrobat case specially rather than changing the general
case around to be only slightly less inconvenient in the problem case.

Of course, the "overwrite arbitrary files" thing needs to get fixed,
but I don't think we should _that_ particular fix be governed by the
behavior of the Acrobat reader on Windows: if that needs fixing, we
should fix that particular case with _dedicated_ code.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum


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