Karl Berry wrote:
On every other platform, it already does build out of the box so far as I know. One of my hopes is that we will be able to adapt Taco's cross compiling so that we can build all the Windows binaries that way. Jonathan is looking towards that for his new front-end.
that would be great indeed
Given the constraints of operating from a language that was dead for systems programming in 1980, a software engineering methodology that forbids us from modifying the original source (tex.web), a bewildering array of programs and authors each of whom likes to do things in their own way (web vs. cweb vs. (c)tie vs. C vs. C++ vs. shell scripts vs. Lua vs. ...), and almost none of whom have any interest in configuration issues, I'd say it's more amazing that it builds on every known platform with, really, minimal trouble for people.
sure, i understand that ... one of the thing is hope for is that eventually we will have everything in portable c
If you have any practical suggestions for how to make the build simpler, believe me, I'd love to hear it. TL is pretty much unique in the free software world, in that we provide precompiled and relocatable binaries and a runnable tree of thousands upon thousands of files for N platforms. You can't expect it all to come for free. And you can't just wave your hands and say we don't need it.
sure, but what always puzzled me is the close connection between a texmf tree and binaries; this may have changed now that we no longer have a dependency (i.e. no pool file any more)
Sorry, but when I hear about how horrible the TeX sources are, I get to feeling a bit defensive!
no problem; i'd not have mentioned it if i'd not knew you; its' just that i wonder what history we still carry that makes live problematic while maybe we can drop part of that history (say that all pascal sources are turned into c ... that would simplify things, wouldn't it?) Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------