[tex-live] windows multiple tl versions

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2011-12-26 at 22:03:44 +0100, Siep Kroonenberg wrote:

 > When you use TL from the command-line there is no problem if you are
 > willing to manage the searchpath yourself. Also, 2010 and 2011 each
 > get their own uninstall registry entries so you can uninstall them
 > in either order.
 > 
 > But there is a conflict with associating a file type with a program.
 > 2010 and 2011 associate extensions with the same filetype, but
 > associate the filetype with different programs viz. the 2010- and
 > the 2011 versions.

Which extensions are concerned?  I doubt that there are many.
TeX Live doesn't provide many programs that can be started by a mouse
click.
 
 > The last one installed wins.

This is fine.  The question is whether there are critical
constellations.  Suppose that I've installed TL-2010 after TL-2011 but
I've modified $PATH manually in order to run programs from TL-2011 by
default.

When creating a .ps file, the programs tex.exe and dvips.exe are found
in the TL-2011 tree according to the $PATH setting.  But when I click
on the created .ps file in the Exploder, ps_view from TL-2010 is
launched.  But this is absolutely harmless.

Is a more critical situation thinkable?

 > Should we add a release tag to the file types?

What do you have in mind?  Making use of the fact that assigning
file-name extensions to programs is a two-step approach on Windows
(assoc/ftype)?

As someone who enjoyed using fvwm2 from the beginning, I've no
experience with KDE or Gnome.  I'm wondering whether the situation is
better on Linux.  I don't have KDE or Gnome installed, but I fear that
they inherited the file association mess from Windows because their
declared goal is to make Linux as inconvenient as Windows.

Do KDE and Gnome insist on absolute paths too?  That would be strange,
but not necessarily surprising.

 > I guess TexWorks might get confused if you do not modify its
 > searchpath. It seems to compose its searchpath from its own location
 > and from the Windows searchpath, so the 2010 TeXWorks might end up
 > using the 2010 perl with the 2011 <root>bin/win32.

Is there any reason why TeXworks maintains absolute paths instead of
simply relying on what's in $PATH?  I.e. call tex instead of
/path/to/tex. 

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha                                      Phone: +49-511-3373112
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