[tex-live] 64 bits version of TeX Live on Windows

[Vincent Torri]

Hello

On Fri, Jun 10, 2016 at 4:26 PM, Angelo Graziosi
<angelo.graziosi at alice.it> wrote:
>
>
> I would remove VS binaries in favor of Cygwin and MSYS2-MINGW64 ones. Notice
> that Cygwin already gives a method to install and use TL in the same manner
> one uses TL on GNU/Linux and OSX (I don't use MacTex): same scripts to setup
> PATHs, same build documents commands and so on... With MSYS2-MINGW64 would
> be the same, almost..

As the Windows maintainer of several projects, I can confirm that with
MSYS2 + mingw-w64, the compilation is the same (and even, cross
compiling on linux is even faster as MSYS2 is quite slow).

it's a matter of using i686-w64-mingw32-gcc or x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc
as compiler, that's all.

I think that you use the autotools, in that case, configure should
just be called like that (in MSYS2 or on linux for cross compilation):

./configure --host=i686-w64-mingw32 etc....

or

./configure --host=x86_64-w64-mingw32 etc....

On the coding side, what is important is that on Windows 64 bits,
'long int' is a 32 bits type, unlike on UNIX 64 bits.

>>
>> I would also be in favour of adding them, but Karl is afraid of the
>> added complexity with not that much "added value" (properly supporting
>> 64-bit Windows also means providing 64-bit perl, ghostscript etc.,
>> doubling the space required for all those binaries and properly
>> deciding whether the Windows in 32-bit or 64-bit, ...).
>
>
> why then having double binaries for other platforms (i386/x86_64 for linux
> etc..)
>
> BTW, having the same app running on different systems helps in finding
> subtle bugs..

indeed.

Vincent Torri