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Re: How to keep a dependency from [continually] appearing in setup


On 8/2/2012 5:14 AM, Adam Dinwoodie wrote:
Ken Brown wrote:
On 8/1/2012 10:18 AM, Ryan Johnson wrote:
It can be argued that emacs-auctex should not pull in texlive. Most
users installing emacs-auctex will already have some flavor of tex in
place, and not necessarily the cygwin one (like the OP, or perhaps a
MikTex user). Plus, the error message is pretty intuitive and the
solution very simple, if latex is not there: "latex: no such command"
==> "maybe I should install latex." Therefore, the expected aggregate

There's more to it than that. emacs-auctex installs stuff needed for its preview feature in /usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/preview/. This won't be found by native texlive or by MikTeX.

frustration of users who installed auctex without latex available would
likely be far lower than the aggregate frustration of users wanting to
install auctex and getting saddled with an unwanted redundant texlive
distribution (for which there is no easy solution).

Why is this so frustrating? It doesn't do any harm (except waste a small amount of disk space) to install Cygwin's texlive in parallel with native texlive. Just make sure the bin directory of the latter precedes /usr/bin in PATH. I myself have both installed, since I sometimes find it useful for testing purposes to be able to switch from one to the other (by temporarily changing PATH).

I'd draw a parallel between the emacs-auctex's dependency on latex and libX11's dependency on xorg-server: while xorg-server is certainly the preferred X server for Cygwin, it's not the only option[0].

[0]: http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2012-02/msg00602.html

The situations aren't parallel. Cygwin's libX11 will work with X servers other than xorg-server. But Cygwin's emacs-auctex, as I explained above, will not work OOTB with tex installations other than Cygwin's texlive. The preview feature will be broken.


Users who prefer a different tex installation and want to use auctex should build and install auctex themselves. During installation, auctex will find the appropriate texmf tree and put its preview files there.

Ken


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