Philip TAYLOR writes:

Reinhard Kotucha wrote:

...

Phil, I respect you because I know that you are an TeX expert. You usually know what you are talking about and you are certainly more familiar with TeX than anybody else. But what you said about UNIX is pure crap and I must admit that I'm quite disappointed.

Well, it was intentionally provocative, but that doesn't mean it's not grounded in truth : if you read back over the TeX live correspondence (which is the list to which I was referring, rather than PdfTeX or NTGTeX or whatever) you will see over and over again questions caused by different libraries, different compilers, different versions, different modes of linking, etc., etc., etc. Every time I read one, I ask myself "Why on earth do they bother ?".

Because they can. So they are more noticeable than the two people who had actually managed to get it compiled under Windows. The autoconf documentation contains a section about portable shell programming: what kind of stuff you can rely on to work everywhere, and what not. It is a real horror show and a bit of a nuisance to keep everything in mind. The resulting scripts sometimes are a bit awkward. But this does not hold a candle to programming cmd.exe. Something like for i in /opt /usr/local /opt/* /usr/local/* do if test -d "$i"/software then cd "$i" subdir="$i" break fi done becomes (in a batch file, on the command line it looks different) for /D %%I in (C:\ D:\ C:\* D:\*) do ( if exist %%I\software\NUL ( %%~dI cd %%~pnI set subdir=%%I goto found ) ) :found Except that it probably won't work when you are in a subdirectory of C: or D: currently. And passing the found string into Java with "%subdir%" can cause the trailing quote to be added (because it may be backslash-preceded) into the command line argument. And if you use "echo on" in your batch file (the default), what gets echoed back at you is garbage, because Windows does not manage to treat the %%x stuff correctly when echoing. It is _much_ _much_ harder to find the necessary information for batch programming under Windows on the net, and while portability is not much of a concern, the portable subset of shell programming is still much more straightforward and usable than what cmd.exe provides. Have you actually programmed any serious batch scripts under Windows? Or are your opinions not based on working with the system? -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum