Op 13-10-18 om 19:58 schreef Paul Johnson:
The only critical flaw in TeXLive we have encountered is that it does not include texi2pdf. Because of that absence, the R team is still devoted to MikTeX as a part of the tool chain to build/use R for windows. I spent a while trying to figure out how to compile texi2pdf on Windows and gave up. (It appears to me the efforts to make open source things work on windows are fraught with danger. The Windows test system here has 5 or 6 different Cygwin-based installations and the path is a tangled web of incompatible libraries and executables. Sorry, that's just a Unix guy in foreign territory whining.)
texi2pdf is a script around makeinfo. MikTeX does not have texi2pdf / makeinfo either. Probably MikTeX is used because it has texify. It is true that texify is able to call makeinfo. But from looking at the source at https://github.com/MiKTeX/miktex, it appears that it does this only if a certain option for that is given on the command line of texify; and if makeinfo is then not available, texify quits.
So it might well be that what texify actually does, is to run latex, bibtex etc. several times; and for that it is indeed very handy. There may be an alternative for this in TeXLive or elsewhere. If not, then it would probably be quite easy to compile texify. In any case, its source code is GPL.
As far as I recall, texipdf / makeinfo is only needed for documents written in an older version of the TeXInfo format. But if it is really needed, then it is easy to compile for Windows, since from the sources at GnuWin32, it appears that it compiles without changes on Windows, with the mingw compiler or with the VisualC++ compiler. It is even easier to compile on Linux with a cross compiler for Windows; so no need for Cygwin.
Kees
