On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 10:20 AM,
Mojca, thank you very much for the detailed and informative information.
Regarding the "native" for cygwin Context, I am currently using TeXLive for Unix-ish Platforms. So the Context In TeXLive for Unix platforms works or has been made to work on Cygwin at some step in the process by someone. How is the TexLive version of ConTeXt prepared?
The same as for all other platforms. Someone (http://www.tug.org/texlive/build.html) had to compile the binaries on cygwin. You can see the binaries here: http://tug.org/svn/texlive/trunk/Master/bin/i386-cygwin/ The binaries are compiled once per year (actually a couple of times withing a short period of time since there are always bugs or problems revealed in the process).
Using the same technique for the standalone to render it runnable on Cygwin like the TexLive version of Context, I should think. What do you think?
Someone would have to compile the binaries then. In addition to what's already in TeX Live that means that whenever a new LuaTeX or MetaPost gets released, the volunteer needs to run the compilation. Is there any performance penalty when using native Windows binaries rather than those for cygwin? Or doesn't it work at all? (Please not a difference between "broken" binaries and broken installation process. I'm asking for the case when installation would succeed.)
Is there a way to download a tree without using rsync? Perhaps a tarball or other archive format?
Not any longer / not yet. But I could try to set it up again. But given that your rsync works fine and it's just the update script that's failing, I could also send you a bash scipt to run a bunch of rsync commands instead of going through texlua. Can you please try to download http://minimals.contextgarden.net/setup/context-setup-mswin.zip, unzip it, run first-setup.bat from cmd, move the files to where your cygwin installation is and check whether it works at all from within the cygwin shell? That is: if normal windows binaries work inside cygwin. Depending on that we can act further. The easiest way would be to fix the installation. The other less trivial way means that either you or someone else with sufficient motivation needs to be ready to keep compiling each new release of luatex when it gets released. And I would need to adapt the scripts (cygwin is more tricky because it's neither windows nor unix and always needs an exception ;). If you want to try building the binaries, do the following: svn co http://svn.contextgarden.net/suite/build-binaries cd build-binaries ./bin_update_src.sh ./bin_update_svn.sh ./bin_build.sh (I would expect problems in the last step of ./bin_build.sh, when copying the files due to the additional *.exe extension, but you may ignore those. The main question is whether the binaries compile at all.) Mojca