KPathSea bindings for Java

[Erik Nijenhuis]

Hi Karl,

On Sun, 2024-07-14 at 09:19 -0600, Karl Berry wrote:
> Perfectly reasonable, but LuaTeX has the advantage of being a binary
> executable that we already have to compile :). A library is a whole
> different world.
Ah, of course, I now see that TL doesn't ship any library at all.
Indeed, I cannot do it exactly like LuaTeX, since that would imply delivering a
Java program with the entire JVM included and statically linked against
kpathsea.


> Sounds fine. As long as TL only has to ship pure Java
> (arch-independent), it'll work for the distribution. Thanks. -k
I will do! I'll make it provide a JAR file, like bib2gls does, and leave the C
code out of the submission. On the other hand, since the lib isn't to be
included, I'm almost tempted to align more towards Java naming, i.e. `tex4j`.
Other extra JNI projects concerning TeX would be unpractical IMO, therefore
calling it generically `tex4j` instead of `kpathsea4j`, despite that the project
isn't that far.

For the jar file however, it could be simply called `kpathsea.jar`.
However, if `tex4j.jar` suites TeX Live too, I could keep the names identical.


Best, Erik


P.S. I've put the wrong license on it. I will change it to GPL sooner or later