mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[TeXmacs <address@hidden>]

Dear Andrey,

On Thu, Aug 08, 2019 at 08:49:37AM +0700, Andrey G. Grozin wrote:
> On Wed, 7 Aug 2019, TeXmacs wrote:
> >We are getting close to releasing the next major version 2.1 of TeXmacs
> >(planned for september).
> Great! The crucial question is: will it be possible to compile and
> use TeXmacs with guile-2.x? guile-1.8 has been removed from most
> Linux distros quite some time ago. It is becoming more and more
> difficult to distribute TeXmacs ax a part of Linux distros (I supose
> MacOS people have the same problem, maybe, Windows people too). I'm
> the maintainer of the TeXmacs package in Gentoo Linux. Now all
> packages requiring guile-1.8, except TeXmacs, have been masked for
> removal, in preparation to the final removal of guile-1.8. I get
> queries about the progress in porting TeXmacs to guile-2 from our QA
> team all the time, and I don't know what to reply.

For the sake of stability, TeXmacs 2.1 will be based on Qt4 and Guile 1.8.

Massimiliano made a lot of progress on Qt5 and Guile 2, but this will
require a significant amount of testing before it will become stable.
That will be our next major objective for version 2.2,
which will hopefully be released in 2020.

> It is difficult to have a good publicity for the new version of
> TeXmacs if it is removed from all Linux distros, and cannot be
> installed in MacOS in a natural way (without installing a package
> which is considered obsolete).

We ship ready-to-run binary packages for the most widely used
GNU Linux distributions as well as MacOS and Windows.
This is not necessarily that bad, because standard distributions
did not always do a good job when building TeXmacs packages.

But thanks for maintaining the Gentoo package; it remains very useful
to have TeXmacs inside standard distributions if the job is well done.
I am also in the process of listing GNU Linux distributions which did
not gave up; it seems to me that both Gentoo and Arch Linux remain
reasonably up-to-date.  You know of any others?

> Alas, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place.
> If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as
> fast as that.

I know, but we have other running to do as well; we do what we can.

Best wishes, --Joris