TeX 1995 July/TeX CD-ROM July 1995 (Disc 1)(Walnut Creek)(1995).ISO/tex-k/tex-k-archive.past/tex-k-archive.gz/tex-k-archive/[e-mail]_Tue Sep 20 04:49:57 1994.msg

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Date: Tue, 20 Sep 94 10:49:57 CST
From: [e-mail] (Ian James McKay)
Message-Id: <[e-mail]>
To: [e-mail]
Subject: problems with kpathsea

Dear Karl (or whoever reads this),

I have been trying to install the basic TeX distribution on a
Sun SPARC (IPX) running SUNOS 4.1.2 with GNU make, bison, flex
and gcc. The configure program seems to find the OpenWindows
X11 includes and libraries with no problem, and I am unable to
see anything wrong with the Makefiles. I have tried several
times to apply the various patches to kpathsea so that the
web2c distribution and the xdvik and dvipsk distributions
match. It fails utterly to work, and craps out everytime it
tries to compile the kpathsea material.

This is frustrating, since the original kpathsea that came
with web2c worked fine. As well I was able to get dvipsk-5.55a
to compile on its own, though it doesn't behave as advertised
(for example MakeTeXPK fails completely, because it can't write
to the ..../tmp directory, even though I gave the entire universe
write permission there).

By the way, your documentation implies
that the versions of kpathsea that come with dvipsk and xdvik
are identical, but this can't be true -- try applying the
kpathsea.ls-R.help patch to dvipsk-5.55a, and you'll find that
db.c isn't even there, though it is in xdvik-1.8.

Here is the most recent of several sets of error messages for
my attemps to make as per your instructions.


gcc  -I. -I.  -I.. -I./..  -I/usr/openwin/include  -g -c dir.c

./kpathsea/dir.h:48: parse error before `*'
./kpathsea/dir.h:48: warning: data definition has no type or storage class
./kpathsea/dir.h:49: parse error before `*'
*** Error code 1
make: Fatal error: Command failed for target `dir.o'
Current working directory /usr/local/web2c-6.1/kpathsea
*** Error code 1
make: Fatal error: Command failed for target `do-kpathsea'
Current working directory /usr/local/web2c-6.1/web2c
*** Error code 1
make: Fatal error: Command failed for target `triptrap'

I am not an expert, and can't afford the time to try to
understand what your code is doing, but to me, this looks
like a basic error in the kpathsea code being reported by the
gcc compiler.

Since you have solicited suggestions for improved documentation,
let me suggest that you could start by being a little more
explicit about what directories to run make in, and in particular
what to do about compiling the whole mess together. If I knew what
kpathsea was doing I would know whether it was safe to compile
xdvik, dvipsk and web2c each with its own version of kpathsea,
but I haven't got a clue whether that is a smart thing to do or not.

I don't want to criticize because I can see the effort that you have
put into this package, but really, it has cost me valuable time
and shows no sign of being a 'comprehensive TeX archive'. It seems
that good, well-tested code for xdvi, dvips and TeX has been complicated
to the point of being uncompilable by having several different versions
of kpathsea floating around. In contrast, even very large packages like
the GNU emacs distribution have been virtually painless to install,
only requiring reading of simple, step-by-step instructions, and some
compile time. Still, my ignorance of the package could be entirely
responsible for my problems now.

Ian McKay