[texhax] TeX Collection

[William Lee Valentine]

Saturday, 23 January 2010


Messieurs et Mesdames:

I am a member of TUG. I received today my TeX Collection DVD from
October 2009. I have installed Protext and MiKTeX, on my machines, from
last year's disc. I was hoping that this year's distribution would
update the one that I have in place. My machines run Windows 2000 and
various distributions of Linux; but I have not settled on a Linux
distribution to use as my primary computing vehicle. I therefore
attempted to install Protext under Windows 2000 as I did last year.

The TeX Collection disc has an autorun.inf file in the root directory,
so Windows 2000 attempted to execute the same when I placed the disc in
my DVD writer. The .inf file instructs Windows to execute

   R:/setup/TeXCollection.exe

where R: is the drive letter for my DVD writer. (I here use slashes
where Windows would itself use backslashes.)

Windows ran this program. An error message appeared indicating that the
file

   R:/setup/TeXCollection.exe.log

could not be created.

Evidently the program

   TeXCollection.exe

attempts to create a log file when it executes. It apparently tries to
create that file in the directory or folder from which the program was
executed. Since the DVD is a read-only medium, that effort will always
fail, as it did for me.

Two options would seem to be available for allowing

   TeXCollection.exe

to run from its DVD and to create files as needed.

(1) Ask the user to specify a directory or folder where files can be
created (as, a directory or folder for temporary files). The log file in
question, and any other temporary files that may be required for
successful execution (as, for the expansion of compressed files), could
then be opened in the directory or folder so referenced.

(2) Copy

   TeXCollection.exe

to a read/write directory or folder, so that it can create temporary
files as needed. I did this, copying the program to a directory that had
available about 300 megabytes of storage. Execution failed again, as,
evidently, the program looks for the auxiliary file

   python25.dll

in the directory from which the program had been executed.

I copied

   python25.dll

into the directory where I had copied

   TeXCollection.exe

and reexecuted the latter.

The program now failed with the following set of error messages.

   L:\tmp\texclctn\TeXCollection.exe.log

   Traceback (most recent call last):

      File "TeXCollection.py", line 5, in <module>
      File "zipextimporter.pyc", line 82, in load_module
      File "wx\__init__.pyc", line 45, in <module>
      File "zipextimporter.pyc", line 82, in load_module
      File "wx_core.pyc", line 4, in <module>
      File "zipextimporter.pyc", line 98, in load_module

   ImportError: MemoryLoadLibrary failed loading wx\_core_.pyd

I hope that this information will enable you to supply users with an
alternate set of instructions for getting

   TeXCollection.exe

to run, at least under Windows 2000.

-- William Lee Valentine