mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

["Philippe Joyez" <address@hidden>]

Happy new year to all!

Good news for TeXmacs & Linux users: You can now find up-to-date TeXmacs
packages for a range of Linux distribution (OpenSuse, Arch, Debian, Ubuntu and
their derivatives, e.g. Mint etc.).

The latest released version (1.99.5) is available here:

https://software.opensuse.org/download.html?project=home:slowphil:texmacs-stable&package=texmacs

The current development version (which I recommend, since it incorporates a
few bugfixes) is also available here:

https://software.opensuse.org/download.html?project=home:slowphil:texmacs-devel&package=texmacs

You can either perform a one-time install of the package suited for your
machine or you can add these repositories into your distribution's source list
so as to update easily whenever new packages become available (instructions
given in the above links).

Disclaimer: Although these package were "successfuly built", most of them have
NOT BEEN TESTED at all, so that you may well encounter all kinds of packaging-
related issues. In that case please be indulgent (keep in mind that this is a
benevolent effort carried out on my free time), report your issue kindly and
I'll try to fix it (any help welcome too!).

Details
Many linux distros no longer provide TeXmacs packages because TeXmacs
presently depends on Guile 1.8 which is deprecated/unmaintained (and even
before that, TeXmacs packages were severely outdated in Debian & Ubuntu, for
instance). Consequently, in the recent years the only way to get a decently
recent TeXmacs on Linux was either to install manually a static binary
available on TeXmacs.org, or to compile it on your own.

Compared to the static binary available on TeXmacs.org, the new packages can
be easily installed, updated and removed using your distribution's package
manager, just like any other application. Moreover, the dependencies are
handled (ghostscript, aspell/hunspell...) and some optimization can be
performed accross packages (e.g. avoiding font duplications...).

These packages are built using OpenSuse's "Open Build Service" (OBS). Kudos to
them for this making this tool with such a great "religious tolerance". OBS
could also build for other distributions (notably Fedora, Centos and RedHat);
let me know if you could help packaging for these.

PS. For Windows, binaries similar to the above "texmacs-devel" can be obtained
from https://github.com/slowphil/mingw-w64-texmacs/releases