mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Wolfgang Jansen <address@hidden>]

Henri Lesourd wrote:
> Wolfgang Jansen wrote:
>
> > is a the impossibility of installing TeXmacs because
> > of errors in C++ code an important bug?
> These kinds of bug are as much bugs in the GNU toolchain
> as these are TeXmacs's C++ bugs.
Are you severe ?  The bug is not somewhere in the GNU toolchain,
it is in TeXmacs: the error message is produced by g++ when compiling
one of the TeXmacs sources, precisely when compiling "Window/X/x_loop".
Please have a look at the end of my bug report from 12/14/07,
i.e. the place where "gmake" stopped because of the error.

> > Half year ago I tried to install TeXmacs on SUN from sources
> > (the existing binary is rather old). Installation failed
> > because of errors in C++ code. My bug report from 12/14/07 seems
> > have to be forgotten: the last version just downloaded fails as well.
> > So, I still work with the holy trinity emacs/latex/xdvi.
> It's hard to debug autoconf-based makefiles, and if we
> don't have the appropriate machines and systems, it's
> even pretty impossible.
I don't think that error reports of "configure" are machine specific.
As I mentioned in the bug report the reason is that the installation
tries to copy/move some files to disk locations not accessible
by a simple user. Once again, please have look at the bug report.
The solution may be just to skip over those parts of "configure"
after successful generation of "Makefile".
> Thus it's likely that SUN machines are used by very
> few people among TeXmacs users, otherwise people
> would have contributed a solution.
>
>
> I'm sorry I have to repeat again the same thing,
> but for issues like this, we *need* the help from
> users (i.e. not only bug reports: hacking and debugging,
> too), for otherwise, we would need to spend all our time
> on such issues rather than on the main bulk of the software.
Sorry, the bug occurs deep in the C++ class dependencies.
I really do not understand which class to modify to fix the bug,
and I do not know which dependencies are disturbed
if I modify something.
Even worse, the first C++ error (where installation stops) today
is at another place (Kernel/Containers/ntuple.hpp), and I do not
know how many may follow.
In any case, I used "g++" for compilation. Is this an exotic compiler?
How did you manage to avoid the compilation errors?
> Thus: we cannot afford spending very much time
> on such issues, especially in a context where
> the problem is also in dealing with debugging
> the autoconf / GNU toolchain mess, and in
> circumstances where, as well, users don't
> want to / cannot help on this.
The failure of "configure" is annoying but is not the killer.
The killer is the bug in C++ code.
Can you really not spend time to eliminate compilation errors?
> > TeXmacs has lost at least one possible user,
> > and I warned my students to use such a buggy software.
> This was not a very sensible idea, for as soon as
> your students use TeXmacs on a widely spread UNIX
> brand (e.g. Ubuntu), it works perfectly.
So, you should restrict your software to specific target platforms only.
The TeXmacs home page says "TeXMacs runs an all major UNIX
platforms and WINDOWS". You may believe it or not, SUN/Solaris is still
a major UNIX platform.

--
Dr. Wolfgang Jansen
University of Potsdam, Germany
mailto: address@hidden