Hi Richard, On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 2:58 AM, rgheck <rgh...@bobjweil.com> wrote: > I'm a little unclear what's meant by "integration" here. Could you explain? > Are we talking about the way that ps2pdf is integrated with LyX, or > something else?
"Integration" means, in general, making both things work together. This time it is a little different than what is done with ps2pdf -- eLyXer is now also distributed as a library (elyxerconv), as well as an executable. With this patch, integration is now done using the library. A little bit of glue Python code is required to call this library, and this is elyxerbridge.py. > In particular, I don't understand why the situation with elyxer is any > different than the situation with any third-party converter that we call. > You put it somewhere in your path, and voila, LyX finds it, configures it, > etc, etc. I can't see why it would have to go into some LyX-related > directory, or why that would be a moderately good idea. What is it that I'm > missing? A few things ;) As Uwe has explained above, Windows integration with the executable does not work well due to a bug in the shell, so when LyX calls eLyXer on Windows as: > elyxer.py --directory "directory path" "input file.lyx" "output file.html" eLyXer does not receive paths with spaces. Mind you, eLyXer standalone works perfectly, and when invoked as follows: > python elyxer.py --directory "directory path" "input file.lyx" "output file.html" it also works. But for this Python needs to find the elyxer.py file. This trick of distributing a library (a very common thing in software engineering) eases end-user installation, since the user does not have to place anything in any path; Python distutils does that for you. It is easier to automate for integrators. It also happens to solve this Windows-specific problem. But it requires some help from LyX developers (which apparently is hard to obtain these times). The option of integrating using an executable is still there, of course. > Well, I think we all know that there are ways it could be better. Jurgen > knows that, I know that, we all know that. But simply complaining about it, > yet again, doesn't help. And offering to do something, again, that the > overwhelming majority of developers have repeatedly rejected won't help > either. If you read my message carefully you will maybe note that I was not offering to do anything about it this time around. Sam Liddicott said it best after the last time: > So I've learned that I can offer what I offer, and if it isn't wanted, I can let it go without wasting too much of my own time. What will definitely not help is sitting around doing nothing about it. Alex.
