Why don't the publishers of TeX just compile first? Why do *I* always have to do the compiling of these programs?! Aaron Gray wrote:

On Sun, 2007-12-30 at 09:31 -0500, Steve VanSlyck wrote: Speaking as a maintainer of upstream FLOSS software, I believe I can answer this. I've had thousands of users over the years ask me to build pre-compiled binary packages for my releases, and I can say that it's nearly impossible to do so. There's no way for me to have all of the possible platforms (32-bit, 64-bit, x86, ppc, etc.) as well as all of the various library versions (with ssl, without ssl, older versions, bleeding-edge versions, etc.) and all of the necessary other pieces to replicate a version which works on every single platform for every single user. Statically-compiled binaries aren't a solution either in most cases. If someone wants to donate hardware that matches every single platform that those users might be using, and contribute to the power bills I'll be paying to use those platforms, I'll gladly consider it, but it's just not a viable option for time/cost/availability reasons. -- David A. Desrosiers desrod(a)gnu-designs.com Skype...: 860-967-3820

On 30/12/2007, Steve VanSlyck <s.vanslyck(a)spamcop.net> wrote: Frequently the people who write the software won't have access to the commercial Microsoft compiling environment, and anyone with Cygwin could run ./configure;make;make install as easily as anyone on Unix. Windows is an utterly alien environment to the Unix way of doing things; supporting Unix open source software properly on Windows - as a reasonably bulletproof package - is something a project has to take on seriously to do well, and most just don't have the resources. This sort of thing is why we have distributions who maintain dependency-resolving repositories ... and why the usual answer to "you don't have x in your repository!" is likely to be "here are the steps to become a maintainer." - d.

Steve VanSlyck wrote: uhh - I run Debian - it only took installing mediawiki1.7-math to get the extension and all the dependencies. And yes, they were installed from binary packages. "apt-get install mediawiki1.7-math" does it.. I think from installing media-wiki, mysql and having math working and configured (it requires teX) took almost 20 minutes. YMMV I didn't need to compile anything - just a few configuration deals. I did spend a little time later writing a script to automatically backup the database. If you needed to customize something it is only a couple of command lines to build it anyway. My hunch is you are using the wrong OS for a server. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Karl Schmidt EMail Karl(a)xtronics.com Transtronics, Inc. WEB http://xtronics.com 3209 West 9th Street Ph (785) 841-3089 Lawrence, KS 66049 FAX (785) 841-0434 Misdirection is the key to being a good magician. Magicians tell you they are doing something while they do something quite different; much like politicians -- except we can afford magicians. -KPS ----------------------------------------------------------------