[tex-live] ebong

George N. White III gnwiii at gmail.com
Wed Jan 19 12:50:08 CET 2011


On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 7:28 PM, Reinhard Kotucha
<reinhard.kotucha at web.de> wrote:

> On 18 January 2011 George N. White III wrote:
>
>  > On Sat, Jan 15, 2011 at 9:10 PM, Reinhard Kotucha
>  > <reinhard.kotucha at web.de> wrote:
>  > >
>  > > 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.
>
> Did you encounter such problems yourself?  By default, the TeX Live
> wrappers make sure that only the Perl shipped with TL is found by
> the scripts they launch,  You'll find more information in
>
>  bin/win32/runscript.tlu

That is fIne for scripts included with TL, but users want to run
scripts they have written (e.g., to extract records from a database
and write a latex table) or found on the internet (CTAN or elsewhere).
 You can't be sure all the add-ons used by such scripts are present in
TL. Users may have been told to install a specific perl version and
run "perl some_scripy.pl", but
not how to check which of multiple perl interpreters on the system is
being used.  A the first
sign of trouble those users will copy the .pl script out of TL and try
"perl some_tl_script.pl".

I rarely use windows, but colleagues (who tend to work in large
multi-author projects with
authors from different labs and on different systems) too often have
problems of the sort where one author can't build the document on
their system.  The windows users tend to use MiKTeX these days, so I
don't hear of problems with TL on WIndows.  A few years ago the perl
scripts in context were a huge source of such problems (maybe those
are no longer needed) -- I wouldn't know as recent projects are mostly
using latex.


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



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