Hello,
The subject was touched on a previous thread.
Since I use a lot TeX, METAFONT and MetaPOST (with CWEB), I wanted to be
freed from what has become a nightmare and a bloatware.
So I have verified that this is feasible and has started with the
following principles:
1) The Pascal way is a noway; so the TeX related stuff will be compiled
with a C compiler.
2) I have retrieved an old (but post 3.0 for TeX) version of Web-to-C
that was still public domain and unemcumbered with GPL or GNU stuff
(getopts, kpathsea and so on). This is web2c version 5.0C (I don't
know if there is a later version still public and GNU free, but I
now don't care; it's fixed).
3) The only packages that will be handled by me (via the change files)
are Donald Knuth's, Tomas Rokicki's dvips (mainly C), John Hobby's
MetaPOST (before kpathsea and the like) and xdvi(1) (obviously this one
will be of no use for Plan9). The data (macros and fonts) should be
usable without much ado. (But I strictly don't care about LaTeX and the
like: I use plain or my own macros. If someone wants this, she will have
to test, on her own, with the core but without me.)
4) I have already handled the tangle/weave bootstrap and web2c
utilities to know if this is achievable. They are POSIXLY compliant and
they work in this preliminary tour. The remaining is an update of the
change files.
5) The first step will be POSIX (this is mainly C89, but some signal
handling and other sys dependant stuff are here). I will remove any
Curses stuff, to build 1D programs that is _line_ oriented interface
(as an example, the editor is ed(1); not vi(1)).
It should compile under APE for Plan9 without problem.
Since I'm late, as usual, with some business stuff for early 2010, don't
expect news before end of January 2010. After verifying the current
state (if one wants TeX, one must download an ISO DVD...), and verifying
that I can have hope to continue using TeX on my own, I put this
aside for the moment.
Cheers,
--
Thierry Laronde (Alceste) <tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com>
http://www.kergis.com/
Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89 250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C
