[tex-k] kpathsea distribution

[Karl Berry]

Hi Norman,

    Is there an official source repository, or distribution location, for  
    kpathsea as a library, rather than as a component of TeX and friends?

No.

kpse has never been released as a standalone library, although many
distros have taken it upon themselves to use it that way.

    > looks more plausible, but refers to <ftp://ftp.tug.org/tex/texk.tar.gz 

Yeah, I have to update all those circa 1990 instructions one of these years.

    My motivation here is to include instructions for getting the kpathsea  
    library in build documentation for an application I maintain,  

A very reasonable motivation; unfortunately, I've never written anything
about this.  My best answer is to look at the dvipng package.

    I recall that the library is included in some TeX distributions, but  
    it's not obviously present in TeXLive, when obtained via MacTeX.

Yes it is.  The sources are not in the installed TL tree; none of
the compiled sources are.  They are in the separate tarball in the
source/ directory.

Anyway, what you want to do for development is make a
(readonly/anonymous) checkout of the kpathsea directory from TL's
subversion repository.  See http://tug.org/texlive/svn.  I don't know
what else is needed, but probably there is more.  Sorry.

I believe you'll want to make a structure mimicking TL, that is,
your/srcdir/kpathsea
your/srcdir/dvi2bitmap
And use automake.

Wish I had a better answer for you, but that is the current reality,
unless documentation is floating around somewhere that I don't know about.

k