[tex-k] [Fwd: Re: limiting \write18]

[Peter Breitenlohner]

On Wed, 4 Mar 2009, Taco Hoekwater wrote:

> My prognosis is that about two weeks from now I will have a first
> version for testing. Peter, I assume it will be best if I start from
> your new stuff?

Hi Taco,

I suppose so.  I am just in the process of moving the luatex libraries from
libs/ to texk/web2c/luatexdir/ and completely bypassing their build systems.
Everything will be done by texk/web2c/Makefile.am (via the
texk/web2c/luatexdir/am/luatex.am fragment), all at the same level,
internal dependencies and rebuild rules all handled automatically by
Automake (and the mechanism for external dependencies such as zlib is
already in place).

This is done in parts, with a temporary mechanism that these libraries are
built even if not yet needed since luatex is not finished (just committed to
testlive as r11042).

>> [Sideremark: Doing this, I noticed that there are several files used by
>> both
>> Aleph and Omega that are identical except for some copyright comments at
>> the
>> begin, and the Omega ones are newer!  And what is the status of the
>> alephdir/*-rc[123].ch files?  Rc3 is incomplete and rc1 seems to be
>> obsolete.  Can't we just rename the rc2 files and scratch the whole
>> *-$(alephbuild).ch thing?]
>
> Giuseppe has no plans to continue work on Aleph, which makes me the
> maintainer until/unless someone else steps up, I guess. I have no
> development plans for Aleph either, but I may patch a bug here or
> there. My vote goes to tie-ing the small change files into larger
> ones as much as possible. Should I do that?

I'd say, leave things as they are, at least until testlive is merged back
into texlive.

>> Also missing are the libraries required by these components,
>> most notably libs/zziplib with its
>
>> bizarre configure script
>
> I am not so happy with the zziplib library myself, I may
> end up cannibalizing the code and stuffing it into luazip
> directly. I'll get back to you on this.

See above, I intend to treat zziplib the same way and build just what is
needed for luatex.

Do you need a multithreading version of libzzip.a?

Regards,
Peter