Cygwin ping! [WAS: 2.96.4 pretest]

Thomas Esser writes:

> Well, 6 weeks since the last beta does not mean that things are stable
> / finnished already...

Sounds like the perfect time for a polite ping/call for help!

Some three months ago a 2.96.0 pretest release triggered me to forward
port the Cygwin and cross-building patch set again.  That turned out
to be a good decision, and I was very happy with Olaf's careful
response, compiled of 17 possible issues and suggestions.

It was one of the most promising things yet in the three years since I
accidentally*) became the Cygwin teTeX maintainer.  I spent the better
part of a weekend to tackle the remaining issues, submitted a new
patchset and waited with great anticipation.

So now I'd like to ask you teTeX people what you have been doing or
are planing to do to get my patches included.  Do you have points of
discussion?  Did the Windows people find any problems at all?

>From what I get to hear, the patch has been stalled at least twice by
concerns from/for the Windows people.  I can imagine that Windows
support is a *very big* thing for teTeX -- much more important than
having a decent Cygwin offering -- but I'd much rather discuss and fix
actual problem reports (if there are any left) than having to wait for
possible concerns to go away.

If you can forgive me for being bold I can make a sugesstion: please
just apply the patchset for 2.96.5 and give the Windows people some
time to raise and fix issues after that.  Of course I'll be available
to help with any problems they might encounter.  Isn't that part of
what a development/pretest phase is all about?

> Happy testing + have fun!

Thanks and greetings,
Jan.

*) My favourite waste of time is developing GNU LilyPond, which is
   developed in Linux, but runs on most modern systems nowadays.
   About five years ago, people started porting LilyPond to
   Windows/Cygwin.

   About three years ago, helping and handholding that process started
   to become a major time sink.  To make things worse, the
   installation and usage of LilyPond on windows was troublesome, at
   best.  Not good publicity for us, and a quite bad effort/result
   ratio for me personally.

   I decided to make LilyPond an offical Cygwin package, to regain
   development time and offer solid Windows support.  In that process
   I noticed that the use of MikTeX was a major source of problems,
   but luckily tetex-beta-200x was packaged for Cygwin.

   The bad news was that the package was buggy, the texmf tree was not
   included in the package, and the teTeX maintainer did not offer to
   spend any more time on it.  When I packaged the texmf tree
   separately, it got included in Cygwin and I was asked by several
   people to take over teTeX maintenenance.

   For a moment I hestitated because I am not a Windows user and
   because teTeX was patched for Cygwin.  After I said ok, I also
   found that the Cygwin patches were bad and that parts of teTeX
   did not cross-build.  My target was to do a good packaging job,
   get the necessary fixes into teTeX and hand the teTeX package
   over to a Cygwin user.  I have already done so for the LilyPond
   package about a year ago.  You can imagine that I would really
   very much appreciate some help closing this open issue.

-- 
Jan Nieuwenhuizen <[email protected]> | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
http://www.xs4all.nl/~jantien       | http://www.lilypond.org