On 1 Oct 2009, at 14:54, Frank Küster wrote:
Hi TeXLive people, Atsuhito Kohda <kohda@pm.tokushima-u.ac.jp> wrote: (on the Debian list)Hi all, thanks for your great work! Now I'd like to know if texworks is included in TL 2009 packages or not.Hm, strange. There's a texworks directory in Master/tlpkg/, it containsa windows binary, some dll's and data. But there don't seem to be sources in Build/.
texworks is not built as part of the texlive build process; it's entirely separate. Hence no sources in Build/.
I just found on the pretest information page in the section about changes in TL 2009: - The TeXworks front end is included on Windows. It will also beincluded in MacTeX. We hope to offer it for separate download on otherplatforms.This means it seems it is *not* included in Unix builds; I have no ideawhere the sources have gone.
Right; the library dependencies make it difficult to create widely- portable Unix binaries suitable for the texlive binary distribution. The expectation is that it will be built/packaged for specific distributions (and some people are already doing that, separately from texlive).
I believe Karl/Tomek/Norbert/somebody is planning to include a package of texworks sources with TL, presumably within Master/source somewhere, but I don't see them yet. As the actual build is done separately anyway, there wasn't much point in installing them early while they were still changing frequently...
For the "original" texworks sources, see http://code.google.com/p/texworks .
I intended to package texworks but, unfortunately or fortunately, my first attempt was rejected. Then I noticed that texworks seems to be included in TL 2009 so it is my concern if it is really happen or not.
Only Windows and Mac (as part of the MacTeX package) binaries will be included with TL'09. I would encourage people to package texworks appropriately for Debian and other distros (some are already doing so), as I think that is the most sensible way to deliver it in most cases.
Can you point us to an older list discussion why TeXworks can't or shouldn't be included in TL 2009?
I don't have a specific pointer handy, but the basic reason is the library dependencies; by default, texworks depends on several Qt shared libraries, as well as poppler, freetype, fontconfig, etc. In principle it should be possible to create statically-linked binaries, I believe, but nobody has taken on that challenge - and static-linking fontconfig, in my (limited) experience, is fraught with hazards. So I'm not sure how successful such an effort would be.
JK