Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

sm-discuss - Re: [SM-Discuss] latex missing from texlive

sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Public SourceMage Discussion List

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: flux <flux AT sourcemage.org>
  • To: sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Discuss] latex missing from texlive
  • Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2011 17:05:58 +0900

Sukneet Basuta (sukneet AT gmail.com) wrote [11.09.13 13:57]:
> texexec on my system consists of
>
> mtxrun --usekpse --execute texexec "$@"
>
> mtxrun is indeed a replacement for texmfstart. The mtxrun source file
> can be seen at
> http://source.contextgarden.net/scripts/context/lua/mtxrun.lua
> . Perhaps I'm wrong by calling it an LuaTeX script, but it definitely
> relies on LuaTeX. I do not know the reasoning behind this (it seems
> silly to me as well). texmfstart.rb is still installed, so I imagine
> you can still use that if you want. Perhaps we can provide that as an
> alternative should the user not want to install luatex, but I'm
> inclined to stick with upstream's decisions.

Personally I'm far more interested in LuaTeX and MkIV anyway (I'm a
rather heavy ConTeXt user as it is now), but that's no reason to throw
out other engines that already work well (especially until we solve the
runtime issues). Having an alternative to fall back on is probably a
good idea, so maybe we can do something via CONFIGURE and INSTALL, at
least until LuaTeX is really ready as a full PDFTeX replacement[1]?

I took another stab at building LuaTeX directly from source, and the
issue is that it complains it can't find ptexenc.h, even if I pass
"--disable-ptex --disable-eptex" to configure. Probably a broken
configure script. If I have time (less than likely) I'll hunt it down
and fix the configure/makefiles/sources and get it to build. If you have
more time than me (which seems quite likely) and the motivation (no idea
for this one :-P) feel free to hunt it down for me. :)

Note that, while the website for LuaTeX mentions the latest stable as
being 0.60 (rather old actually), *all* of their source releases are
labeled as beta-, including 0.60. I'll try and talk to the developers
and find out if they can be a little more sane with their release
naming/announcements.

I suppose we should add some suggest_depends for the scripting languages
that various TeX macro packages/formats make use of (perl, ruby, lua,
etc.). I had forgotten about needing to do this after I got busy and
didn't have time before.

[1]: The author of PDFTeX has officially designated LuaTeX as the future
replacement of PDFTeX when LuaTeX has acquired all of the needed
features and is stable enough. That hasn't happened yet though, so it's
still just a future replacement, not a ready replacement. It's getting
there though.

--
Justin "flux_control" Boffemmyer
Cauldron wizard and general mage
Source Mage GNU/Linux
http://www.sourcemage.org

Attachment: pgp7OSGCQkHam.pgp
Description: PGP signature




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page