[tex-live] ghostscript 9.15 announced

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2014-09-24 at 09:44:55 +0100, Robin Fairbairns wrote:

 > karl -- we only have obsolete ghostscript on ctan, from a time when
 > it the status of the thing on the source wasn't clear.
 > 
 > is there any ambition to have a copy on ctan?  (anyone?)

IMO it's sufficient to replace the Ghostscript files on CTAN by an
HTML file containing a link to http://www.ghostscript.com .

Ghostscript is ubiquitous on Unix.  TeX Live provides Ghostscript for
Windows already and AFAIK MacTeX and MiKTeX too.

On Windows an external gs will not be used by scripts in the texmf
trees.  Scripts in MiKTeX expect a program called mgs.exe and TeX Live
invokes gswin32c.exe with a modified environment (PATH, GS_LIB).  

I also think that Unix users who are interested in the latest version
obey ghostscript.com rather than CTAN.

The advantage of an HTML file with links to the canonical site is that
you don't have to do anything yourself, the disadvantage is that it's
more difficult to announce new releases.  IMO the only reason to have
gs on CTAN are the announcements at ctan-ann at dante.de.

But maybe it's possible to check automatically when a new release
comes out.  If you run

  rsync ${OPTIONS} http://www.ghostscript.com/download/gsdnld.html |
     grep 'gsdnld.html'

as a cron job then the chron daemon sends you a mail whenever the HTML
file changes.

Mirroring is not an option.  The size of the gs download directory is
2.8 GB.

I fully agree with Karl (remove Ghostscript from CTAN) but I think
that an HTML file with links to ghostscript.com is useful.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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