Dæmonic soufflés have no rôle in naïve œvres. 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
