Re: Standalone Installation Question

[Mojca Miklavec <mojca.miklavec.lists@gmail.com>]

Hi,

Just to make it clear:

1.) There used to be support for the native cygwin binaries in the
ConTeXt distribution, but I only remember a single person asking for
it and when it had to be built and debugged, he didn't have sufficient
time to help debug the problem. Because of many problems (which could
be solved, but there would have to be people interesting in testing
and solving the problems, provide feedback, ...) the native cygwin
binaries have been removed.

2.) first-setup.sh may recognise cygwin, but it won't download
anything because the binaries aren't present. Maybe I should change
the script to make this explicit and return an error when running on
cygwin (there is not error checking - if fetching the files fails,
it's not really evident).

On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 6:06 PM,  <hwitloc@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> To: ConTeXt package maintainer for TeXlive distribution:
>
> TeXlive as of 2011 or so is compatible under unix type with cygwin.
>
> I do not want to use the Microsoft version.  There is no reason from me to change
> code and scripts to work with Microsoft's methods.

There is no need to. If you fetch ConTeXt with binaries compiled with
MSVC, you should be perfectly capable of running those binaries in
cygwin environment without having to be aware that they are not for
cygwin. (I might be wrong, but that's my understanding.) Unless you
are a purist and want to avoid anything that has been compiled with
MSVC due to potential security risks, there is no reason why the
standard binaries couldn't be used.

>  Also I will not give up the unix developement environment that cygwin delivers to work with ConteXt.

You really don't need to. Even if you keep using the windows version.

> I'd like to know the the Context package that was submitted to TeXlive.

ConTeXt was taken from http://www.pragma-ade.com/download-1.htm. Some
scripts were used to assemble everything together. You need to check
TeX Live sources (http://tug.org/svn/texlive/trunk/Build/) if you are
curious about how it was done.

> I presume this was in source format.

Yes. But except for mtxrun.exe (which is just a windows wrapper for a
lua script), the luatex binary (which is not part of ConTeXt) and the
formats (that are generated on the fly), ConTeXt doesn't need any
compilation. TeX Live contains "sources" for ConTeXt only + some
binary wrappers for lua files (not relevant for cygwin). Everything
else is either not part of ConTeXt or is using a scripting language.

> How can I get that for the beta/current MKIV
> and build it myself?

Do you want the latest version inside TeX Live or the standalone
distribution? If you want a working standalone distribution, a bit of
work is needed first to set up everything. Most notably you or someone
else would need to volunteer to provide binaries for at least LuaTeX
and MetaPost.

If you need the latest ConTeXt in TeX Live, it might be sufficient to
create a separate texmf tree, put ConTeXt there and set up TEXMF paths
properly, plus make sure that the latest mtxrun comes first in PATH.
Or create a tlpkg with the latest ConTeXt and install it with tlmgr
then.

Mojca
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