Ken Brown wrote: >On 8/1/2012 10:18 AM, Ryan Johnson wrote: >> It can be argued that emacs-auctex should not pull in texlive. Most >> users installing emacs-auctex will already have some flavor of tex in >> place, and not necessarily the cygwin one (like the OP, or perhaps a >> MikTex user). Plus, the error message is pretty intuitive and the >> solution very simple, if latex is not there: "latex: no such command" >> ==> "maybe I should install latex." Therefore, the expected aggregate > >There's more to it than that. emacs-auctex installs stuff needed for >its preview feature in /usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/preview/. This won't >be found by native texlive or by MikTeX. > >> frustration of users who installed auctex without latex available would >> likely be far lower than the aggregate frustration of users wanting to >> install auctex and getting saddled with an unwanted redundant texlive >> distribution (for which there is no easy solution). > >Why is this so frustrating? It doesn't do any harm (except waste a >small amount of disk space) to install Cygwin's texlive in parallel with >native texlive. Just make sure the bin directory of the latter precedes >/usr/bin in PATH. I myself have both installed, since I sometimes find >it useful for testing purposes to be able to switch from one to the >other (by temporarily changing PATH).
I'd draw a parallel between the emacs-auctex's dependency on latex and libX11's dependency on xorg-server: while xorg-server is certainly the preferred X server for Cygwin, it's not the only option[0]. [0]: http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2012-02/msg00602.html I've no particular preference for whether one package includes another that is a "soft" dependency, but I do think it's important to maintain consistency. Either dependencies where some users are likely to want to use non-Cygwin tools should be installed regardless, or they should not, and that should be applied across the board. Inconsistency harms least astonishment, and harming least astonishment makes me very sad. -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
