Re: [Axiom-developer] Re: Requiring LaTeX

[Gabriel Dos Reis]

On Sat, 2 Sep 2006, Ralf Hemmecke wrote:

| > We are primarily interested in testing Axiom.  Consequently, I
| > believe we should make it possible to allow people to test Axiom on
| > system lacking latex.  I don't see how that harms Axiom.
|
| Gaby, in order to stop the whole debate... You've heard Tim. He is not
| preventing people to do anything good or bad. What I understood this
| morning was that when Tim speaks of Axiom he refers to the gold release.
| If you (and I) think that it is good for Axiom to modify the Makefiles
| that (a part of) Axiom builds even if latex is not present, then we are
| allowed to do that. Tim might not want it moved into gold, but even if
| these modified Makefiles stay in silver, it would speed up the build
| process and allow other people testing at least a part of Axiom.
|
| I think the simplest way would be to ask configure to generate a
| variable LATEX that expands to 'latex' if LaTeX is installed on the
| system and no "--without-latex" switch is given or it expands to 'echo'.

that is indeed one way to do it.

| Then in each place where latex is used it should read ${LATEX}.
| These are the only files that refer to latex as a command.
|
| src/interp/bookvol5.pamphlet
| src/doc/Makefile.pamphlet
| src/doc/bookvol1.pamphlet
| src/script/document

document does many things, including latexing input files.  And it is
used at many places.

I would like to divide the make rules so that we have "make dvi" that
does the latexing, separated from the rest.  Of course, for releases
"make all" will compile codes and "make dvi".

-- Gaby