mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[TeXmacs <address@hidden>]

On Thu, Aug 08, 2019 at 06:06:38PM +0700, Andrey G. Grozin wrote:
> On Thu, 8 Aug 2019, TeXmacs wrote:
> >For the sake of stability, TeXmacs 2.1 will be based on Qt4 and Guile 1.8.
> The TeXmacs package in Gentoo is based on Qt5 for quite long time,
> and works fine. Qt4 is absent in Gentoo for ages.

Thanks Andrey, that is good to know.  The Qt5 version under MacOS
crashed rapidly after start-up until several months ago when a few
nasty bugs were corrected.  We will need to do more testing and
adjust our build-process, but what you say makes it plausible that
the move to Qt5 could happen sooner than I feared.

> >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.
> Thank you for the information.

The point with Guile 2 is that it basically has nothing to do with Guile 1,
so the most of the interface has to be rewritten and retested.
At a first stage, we plan to run Guile 2 in interpreter mode.
This causes a slow-down with respect to Guile 1, but it will at least
enable us to track down potential problems.  During a second stage,
we should move to the compiled version, but this will again require
a lot of work and testing.

> >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.
>
> Many Linux users and developers try to avoid to install software not
> via the native package manager of the distro they use. This is
> especially true for software than bundles outdated libraries.
> Critical vulnerabilities are usually quickly fixed in libraries
> which are installed in the normal way; but if there are colies of
> these libraries bundled by some application, such vulnerabilities
> stay unfixed arbitrarily long.

This is probably correct for Linux developers, but less so for
ordinary users.  In the cases of Debian and Ubuntu, we have also
set up a TeXmacs repo that can be added in order to manage TeXmacs
in the usual way (and automatically get updates).

Best wishes, --Joris