From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
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Date: Sat,  1 Jan 2011 05:06:16 -0800
Message-ID: <AANLkTimtLw4_jO-K_2fR9Sz5cR9qegCLxyFpPqW3FXvs@mail.gmail.com>
From: Akshat Kumar <akumar@mail.nanosouffle.net>
To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net>
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Subject: Re: [9fans] kerTeX install and setup
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Sorry for this - couple of things I felt were
important, but forgot to mention.

kertex/tex is too verbose for a command that
takes input from stdin by default. It would
be nice to get rid of the version header
and all that stuff (I'm already dreading the
re-compile and re-install processes).
And I feel it shouldn't produce a transcript
log by default (and place it in the current
dir). Perhaps consider a command-line
option for that?

On Sat, Jan 1, 2011 at 3:35 AM, Akshat Kumar
<akumar@mail.nanosouffle.net> wrote:
> D=E6monic souffl=E9s have no r=F4le in na=EFve =9Cvres.
>
> I decided to try kerTeX on Plan 9 earlier today.
> I'm a bit displeased with the installation procedure.
>
> Firstly, would the maintainer perhaps consider
> putting this package up as a contrib install
> (using fgb's contrib suite)? This would make the
> process much smoother (I ran into a few bugs
> in the shell scripts and had to do a few extra
> binds to get out of a few other troubles).
>
> In the actual placement of things, I think most
> items of the installation are placed in accordance
> with the general Plan 9 scheme, but I was a bit
> baffled with the *.fmt, *.base, and *.log files going
> in the /386/bin/lib/kertex directory - even /386/bin/lib
> doesn't make sense to me. Consider changing this
> to some place in /lib/kertex (I moved them to
> /lib/kertex/tex/mac and changed the TEXDUMP
> environment variable accordingly).
>
> The manpage files end in *.1, which is probably a UNIX-ism.
> On Plan 9, it should just be the command name without
> a suffix.
>
> I feel that the scheme should be that if you are
> self-compiling kerTeX, then the installation should
> go into $home/bin/386 and $home/lib - that is, be
> confined to your $home. And for the global install
> one can use the contrib package.
>
> I mention these seemingly trivial things, because the
> actual installation of this package is highly non-trivial.
> Although it works around having to use autoconf hell,
> it still has a rather complicated pre-install config setup.
>
>
> Best,
> ak
>