Re: [NTG-pdftex] [tex-live] Runtime limitations on open files?

Hans Hagen writes:

Martin Schröder wrote:

...

2007/8/17, Akira Kakuto :

...

I've confirmed that by

#if defined(pdfTeX) || defined(luaTeX) _setmaxstdio(2048); #endif

2041 files in Vladimir's example are included. Probably 7 are stdin, ... etc.

And I claim that this is a Windows-only problem that doesn't appear on Unix. ;-)

I'm pretty fed up with these windows rants and 'no problem on unix' kind of crap ... and i also much disliked the tone of mails posted to the lua list about this problem suggesting that it's a windows problem etc etc and suggesting that it's near to impssible to compile something on windows ... a fact that is proven wrong by fabrice and akira

"near to impossible", "easy", "trivial": those are synonyms only for mathematicians. And counterexamples just prove "not impossible". I have in this thread described that supporting Windows installations has proven to be _the_ major developer tiedown for the company I am working in for most of the last 6 months, and that it has proven to be a major developer resource hog for AUCTeX (which I am maintainer of) as well. Nobody lists the names of people who managed to compile TeXlive on Unix. It is not actually an achievement worth noting, in particular on the rather Posix-compliant free Unix variants/clones. The README in TeXlive contains no build instructions for Windows.

(anyhow, it's no problem to macro program around the problem, either by using immediate flushing (if remember right one solution was to close 1-page docs afterwards because it's the multipage docs that complicate things but i dunno what's left of that patch) and/or do a multipass job)

Again, "no problem" and "conceivably possible" are the same mostly for mathematicians. In the mean time, there remains the problem that the number of open files permitted by the C library is much more limited on our Windows compilations than technically mandated, and I propose that this be fixed, regardless of whether or not other platforms don't exhibit this behavior. -- David Kastrup