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 <aku...@mail.nanosouffle.net> wrote: > 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 >
