On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 8:37 PM, Joel C. Salomon wrote:

Two questions came up when I was looking into putting ConTeXt on a USB stick (i.e., as a "portable app"):

1. Is perl still required for a ConTeXt installation (say, under Windows)? I know texexec is now written in Ruby, but are there other programs in Stand-alone or the Minimals that require perl?

mptopdf at least ... But it might be possible to do without (I'm not sure - you need to try). If you put things on usb, it should be enough to set PATH properly, that's all. Neither perl nor ruby need a proper installation.

2. I vaguely recall some mention of eventually replacing texexec with a Lua version. Is this actually being planned, and would that eliminate the external language dependencies of ConTeXt?

Yes. You can already use "context" (see mtx-context.lua), though there is no stub yet (you can easily make one), and it's not so well tested yet. Mojca

Joel C. Salomon wrote:

Two questions came up when I was looking into putting ConTeXt on a USB stick (i.e., as a "portable app"):

1. Is perl still required for a ConTeXt installation (say, under Windows)? I know texexec is now written in Ruby, but are there other programs in Stand-alone or the Minimals that require perl?

perl is not needed, unless you want to run mptopdf, and even that is not needed because texexec can do the same

2. I vaguely recall some mention of eventually replacing texexec with a Lua version. Is this actually being planned, and would that eliminate the external language dependencies of ConTeXt?

luatex + context mkiv is indeed independent - index sorting takes place in mkiv - job control is done with mtxrun/mtx-context 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 -----------------------------------------------------------------