Mail Archives: cygwin/2012/09/25/17:20:47
[Please don't top-post.]
On 9/25/2012 2:10 PM, Wynfield Henman wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 10:07 AM, Ken Brown wrote:
>> On 9/25/2012 11:41 AM, Ryan Johnson wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> I'm trying to upgrade a set of existing cygwin packages, and texlive
>>> suddenly wants to install itself, apparently due to a new dependency
>>> from gnuplot. Is this really necessary?
>>
>>
>> This dependency is created by cygport. It's of course up to the gnuplot
>> maintainer (Volker Zell) whether or not he wants to override it, but I can
>> explain the rationale. gnuplot installs some files into
>> /usr/share/texmf-dist. To make it possible for tex to find those files, the
>> gnuplot postinstall script runs /usr/bin/mktexlsr. The latter is provided
>> by texlive-collection-basic, so this package is required by gnuplot.
>>
>> Maybe you should just bite the bullet and install texlive. It won't
>> interfere in any way with your native TeX Live installation, as long as you
>> put the bin directory for the latter first in your path.
> I don't agree. The solution should not be to install an unnecessary
> package and waste space and complicate by having to check order in the
> PATH variable.
People who install programs that are not provided by Cygwin have to
expect to set PATH appropriately, including checking the order of the paths.
> It would be better that a.) installation scripts check for the
> existence of the necessary commands first and not brute force the
> installation or warning that the cygwin port of it be installed.
For the issue being discussed in this thread (the gnuplot dependency on
texlive-collection-basic), the necessary command *is* /usr/bin/mktexlsr.
Running the mktexlsr provided by the native TeX Live distribution will
not do the job (which is to make the files installed in
/usr/share/texmf-dist accessible to tex).
> It may also be desirable, to have setup use a list of packages to NOT
> install, regardless of any dependencies.
I don't think setup.exe should make it quite that easy for people to
circumvent dependencies. But maybe something like the Debian "equivs"
facility would be useful (see http://www.tug.org/texlive/debian.html for
a discussion of this in the context of TeX Live).
As usual, it's easy to come up with ideas for enhancing setup.exe; but
http://cygwin.com/acronyms/#SHTDI
Ken
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