[tex-live] TeXstudio: candidate for TeX Live 2014?

[Karl Berry]

Hi Nelson.  Thanks for the extensive report.  I don't have personal
experience with TeXstudio, though we do mention it in the TeX Live
manual and TUG web pages as one of the many front ends out there
(TeXmaker, SciTE, WinShell, and plenty more all have their proponents).

We have always resisted including large GUI programs in TL precisely
because of the problems you ran into -- the dependencies on Qt (or GNOME
in other cases), and plenty more.  As a result, any given binary is
unlikely to run on more than a tiny fraction of systems on a given
platform (e.g,, x86_64-linux).  As you know, we expend a lot of effort
to ensure as best we can that the binaries we distribute run on a wide
variety of systems, by statically linking libraries as much as possible.
With big GUI programs, that's not workable.

The one exception is that we distribute the TeXworks binary for Windows.
We chose TeXworks specifically because it was designed and intended for
TeX newcomers -- the people likely least able or interested in choosing
among the front ends, let alone actually installing one.  (That is also
why TUG supported its development.)

I would welcome making links to precompiled TeXstudio or other
.tar.gz/.zip's for any available platforms, so users can easily install
it.  (I would hope the program maintainers would welcome them too, but
maybe not.)  I cannot easily imagine making it, or any big GUI program,
part of the base TeX Live.

All the best,
Karl