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. ;-)

well, it has been a problem there (till the number was jumped there; i clearly remember such problems a few years ago); also, fabrice investigated the problem years ago and provided solutions but as usual his patches were never included in the code base so no wonder that the problem creeps up again ... 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 (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) 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 -----------------------------------------------------------------

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

"Martin Schröder" writes:

2007/8/17, David Kastrup :

...

"near to impossible", "easy", "trivial": those are synonyms only for mathematicians. And counterexamples just prove "not impossible".

Stop.

Let's get back to the facts: I can easily include 10000 different pdfs on one page (and claim that the number of files is only limited by memory) -- when \pdfximage is \immediate (which is normally is not). This works on Linux. Does this not work on Windows?

Can't check during the weekend. What does it mean for an image to be immediate? Probably something different than for a write... One would need to patch up \includegraphics when using this with LaTeX, right? -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum

"Martin Schröder" writes:

2007/8/17, David Kastrup :

...

Can't check during the weekend. What does it mean for an image to be immediate? Probably something different than for a write... One would need to patch up \includegraphics when using this with LaTeX, right?

No. http://sarovar.org/tracker/?func=detail&atid=493&aid=498&group_id=106

I am afraid that I am none the wiser what it would mean and imply to turn every \pdfximage into \immediate\pdfximage. -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum

Hans Hagen wrote:

I'm pretty fed up with these windows rants and 'no problem on unix' kind of crap ...

Don't rise to the bait, Hans : for every Windows-specific problem mentioned on this list, there are probably ten *X-specific problems, almost invariably caused by the fact that there are ten million computers in the world running *X, and each and every one of them has different libraries, different compilers, different versions, different this, different that, different everything. Windows is the one thing that keeps most of us sane : just laugh when the *X guys feel so insecure that they have to launch yet another attack :-))) ** Phil.

On 8/17/07, Hans Hagen wrote:

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

Another proof that it is possible to build highly functional cross-platform applications is the R statistical package. In general, I don't have much patience for these religious discussions (which have an unfortunate tendency to pop up in google searches so an offhand comment becomes part of the folklore). The TeX community is at a critical juncture: 1. TeX Live has, by fiat, become the successor to teTeX on *x systems 2. TeX Live aims to support a wider range of platforms than did teTeX. We have a long history of failed TeX distributions on Windows: 4allTeX, Y&Y, fptex, which is a clear sign that making a viable TeX distro for Windows is not easy. There are individuals and organizations that are able to use TeX productively under Windows and under *x, so I don't except that either of these is fundamentally broken. What is, however, clear, is that many people have had or are having bad experiences. In fact, I see this at work, where some users insist that tex on unix is totally useless while others assert the same about TeX on Windows. What is the difference? 1. In the real world, many systems are not working as they should. When I press guy who says tex on unix is useless it turns out that his problems are: a) he wants to use a printer on a Windows server that is not configured on the unix machine, b) the system default is for a4 paper and he can't be bothered to figure out how to adjust this, and c) there is nothing similar to WinEDT on the system. The guy who says TeX on Windows is useless has installed 4allTeX, Y&Y, fptex, and miktex along with copies of his $HOME/texmf from unix but hasn't got a working perl, ruby, or ghostscript and is trying to use notepad as his editor. His plain tex documents compile, but he can't get pdflatex to work because he has some outdated packages that assume pdftex is used only to produce .pdf output. He can't troubleshoot because the command line tools (find, whence, etc.) he knows from *x aren't available. 2. Different environments require different work habits. Many Windows TeX users never see a command line, equate TeX with WinEDT, and are only vaguely aware of the individual programs, much less perl, ghostscript, etc. 3. Hardware differences: machines currently in wide use range from PIII 500 mhz with 256M RAM and 20GB disk to multi-core CPU, multi-GB RAM, and multi-TB disk. To me, the fundamental difference is that *x systems have always been based on a toolkit approach where a set of core utilities are always available. People will tell you that you can have bash, awk, sed, perl, ghostscript, make, compilers, etc. on Windows, but the practical reality is that such tools aren't part of the standard base configuration and suffer from performance issues. The pdftex build script works on most *x systems using only standard packages from the OS distribution. I have written some applications that are used on both *x and windows. While it is possible to have a build environment on Windows (using Msys), it has been much easier to use a cross-compiler under linux, e.g., http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/Rtools/. It would be interesting to try using these tools to create a build-win32.sh for pdftex. -- George N. White III Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia