[tex-live] web2c-win32 volunteer?

Olaf Weber olaf at infovore.xs4all.nl
Wed Apr 14 23:13:06 CEST 2004


Fabrice Popineau writes:

>> At the web2c end, my sense is that for unix installations many of the
>> binaries aren't much used either.  They're there because they're a
>> traditional part of the whole suite of tools.  I don't see having them
>> be there as much of a problem.

> An example of the mess is the web2c directory itself, at least on my
> side: I have set it up to compile all the regular stuff + omega-1.15 and
> omega-1.23 and both eomega-1.15 and eomega-1.23 and now aleph, then
> pdfxtex (?) etc.

Well, my working tree looks like that too, except that I've got only
one version of omega and one version of eomega compiling.

> Morevover I can't use the same trick as you can in Unix: compiling
> outside of the source tree. Anyway that wouldn't work because I have
> more stuff than stored in the regular source tree.

The targets I use to build a distibution tarball work only if I'm in
the source tree, and have built in the source tree.  So I work in the
source tree, and test outside-source-tree builds occasionally.  This
is one of the reasons why there are targets like vftovp-clean in the
makefiles, so I can easily target a specific binary for rebuilding.

After compilation, there are some 450 entries in my texk/web2c
directory, but I don't find that particularly difficult to deal with.
So I guess I'm not sure what the problem is with the texk/web2c
directory, unless it is related to a directory with 450+ entries being
hard to manage with graphical tools.

>> Another issue is what it means to "turn this stuff into a more real
>> Windows application".  I'm note sure what the expections are, and

> No shell scripts. Turn every program into a dll  with a defined API, add
> a command line interface only when needed.

You can do something like that on unix, but of course it works only on
platforms that support shared libraries (which I think the patforms we
actively support do by now).  But there is a catch, in that the
details of shared library support vary considerably between systems
(apparently not all of them allow you to hide library-internal
symbols, for example).

> Fabrice

-- 
Olaf Weber

               (This space left blank for technical reasons.)



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