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


On Thu, Aug 02, 2012 at 09:14:14AM +0000, 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

That is not the same thing at all.  You can run xterm on your Windows
box without an X server.  It's not the same as suggesting that a package
dependency which could theoretically be solved by installing a
non-cygwin package should be accommodated or encouraged by a cygwin
package.

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