[tex-live] TL and win32

[Staszek Wawrykiewicz]

On Wed, 20 Dec 2006, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:

> A friend tested getnonfreefonts as a normal user though he had installed
> TeXLive as root.  He got an error message "Permission denied" of course.

Well, we wrote several times that the installer for tl2005 had a bug
(texmf-var tree was left RO). It was corrected some months ago.
 
> I don't know how this problem can be solved without the -sys files.

Simply, we do not have *-sys programs for win32, and all _working_ config
files and all generated stuff (formats, map files, pk fonts, etc.) is
stored just in $TEXMFVAR. That's more simple, understandable _for win32
users_ and more easy to maintain, debug, help people, etc. etc. (at least
at the current stage of matters!). Please note, that we also set TEXMFCNF
for win32 ($TEXMFVAR/web2c), so the original texmf/texmf.cnf is still
untouched to use for, e.g., networking etc. But as most win32 users have
TL installed on their personal machines, we try to make live somehow more
easy (again: maintaining, debuging, helping people), that means: less
directories, less variables, etc. Nevertheless, everything is still open
for advanced users and admins and nothing was removed from the TL's
flexibility, even for win32 users. That's (not only) my point of view.
 
> [...]
>   > As I wrote you before, I consider all those .bat files from the
>   > Ghostscript distribution very rarely needed for TeX
>   > applications...  We have enough scripts using GS, so I would leave
>   > the whole mess to the (advanced) users. All in all, the installer
>   > have to add gswin32c.exe location to PATH, and add GS_LIB env
>   > variable.
> 
> It's a pity that ghostscript is under GPL so that it is not required
> to provide the complete package.  Please excuse me for being so
> impolite, but I find it quite annoying if people decide which software
> other people have to use.  Are you sure that everything works if you
> arbitrarily remove scripts?  Some scripts/programs depend on other
> scripts/programs.  Do you have a complete overview?
> 
> I don't understand why you try to break everything deliberately.

Reihard, I'm very sorry:
1. You do not need excuse me, as I really appreciate your help, your work, 
   and I know you and like,
2. I'm not going to decide what is installed by regular GS distribution,
   I just install it and use (on win32 Gs is installed without setting 
   PATH and any other variable, please note that),
3. I do not remove any script (or any other part) from Gs. Again, 
   I proposed to install it *as is* distributed (easy to uninstall by 
   standard win32 way), so sorry, I'm not going to break anything.
[more of that below]   

>   >> It is much better to have a zip file which is supposed to be
>   >> extracted in tlroot.  I'll create such a zip file tomorrow.  You
>   >> can look into it and decide whether you want to use it or not.
> 
> I created such a zip file:
> 
>   http://ms25.ath.cx/gs8.54-win32-tl.zip
> 
> The directory structure is:
> 
>    bin/win32
>    gs/Resource/CMap
>    gs/Resource/ColorSpace
>    gs/Resource/Decoding
>    gs/doc
>    gs/examples
>    gs/lib
>    gs/lib/fonts
>    gs/man/de/man1
>    gs/man/man1
> 
> The bin/win32 directory contains all the binaries, the dll, and all
> batch files.

Hmm... Let me continue my enumeration:
4. Gs is an external program for TL, but needed for some batch tasks; 
   for TL we need to provide PATH to the core Gs binaries and GS_LIB 
   variable, as many our programs use Gs in batch mode, nothing more
5. users can have Gs already installed
6. it should be installed only on demand (see 5.)
7. Gs can be easily uninstalled; the standard installer does allow it 
   (see 3.)
8. batch files and other scripts distributed with Gs are out of our
   interest (I consider them rather as mostly sketches for advanced users,
   even the most valuable for TeX users, like ps2pdf.bat, needs some
   insight and I use it completely changed and simplified); please still
   have in mind that Gs installed natively doesn't add the PATH etc.
9. so there's no need to mix TL+GS binaries and put other stuff into TL
   tree for the above reasons

> The fonts are inside the lib directory.  It is sufficient to point the
> GS_LIB variable to the lib directory and you don't have to care about
> a font directory.

well, we can organise what we want, only having in mind TL's 
perspective...

> What I have done is:
> 
>    * Put the fonts into gs/lib/fonts.
>    * Create a file gs/lib/Fontmap.TeXLive.
>    * Change gs/lib/Fontmap so that Fontmap.TeXLive is used instead of
>      Fontmap.GS. 
> 
> gs/lib/fonts contains the fonts:
> 
>    * The famous 35 URW fonts (from CTAN, maintained by Walter Schmidt),
>    * Bitstream Charter,
>    * Adobe Utopia.

Fine by me, but I'm against replacing all Gs standard fonts by our
(still having in mind that Gs is all-purpose, independent program, which 
can be unistalled and replaced by more newer version). I'm not sure if
fonts you proposed (removing btw. all standard ones, as you did, see 3.) 
are enough fine or better :-). "standard" fonts distributed with Gs8.54
contains e.g. cyrillic glyphs by Valek Flipov.

> These are the fonts mentioned in the original GS Fontmap but some of
> them are not provided by GS.
 
Sorry, my task is to make TL working, not changing Gs.

>   > OK, it would be better to unzip it e.g. in just c:\gs
> 
> Why?  Is there any good reason to remove ghostscript from TeXLive?  
> What do you want to achieve?

No, I don't want to remove Gs from TL, but I found a better solution how 
to put in on TL's CD/DVD (thanks to your investigations :-)

Cheers,

-- 
Staszek Wawrykiewicz
StaW at gust.org.pl