How to keep a dependency from [continually] appearing in setup

[Ken Brown]

On 8/2/2012 5:14 AM, Adam Dinwoodie wrote:
> 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

The situations aren't parallel.  Cygwin's libX11 will work with X 
servers other than xorg-server.  But Cygwin's emacs-auctex, as I 
explained above, will not work OOTB with tex installations other than 
Cygwin's texlive.  The preview feature will be broken.

Users who prefer a different tex installation and want to use auctex 
should build and install auctex themselves.  During installation, auctex 
will find the appropriate texmf tree and put its preview files there.

Ken


--
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