Bob Tennent wrote: > >|At the risk of labouring a point I have made in another post: it isn't > >|just a question of building documentation. It's about a method for > >|creating a LaTeX document containing plenty of music snippets > originally >|coded in M-Tx. > > But the document in question *is* the main documentation for mtx. Would > everybody be happy if there were *both* a Makefile (to demonstrate how to > create a LaTeX document containing etc.) *and* a platform-independent > script to build the documentation from scratch without using any > "foreign" tools?
No - having more than one build system for anything (the Makefile vs the Lua script) is a maintenance *catastrophe* - especially if the principal maintainer isn't able to maintain both scripts him/herself. I get bored having to patch OCaml packages where some keen soul tried to write a platform-independent script (usually to enable some kind of Windows support) years before which no longer works with the latest version (because the main developers use make and don't understand the scripting used) rather than just patching the Makefile to work correctly (and maintainably) on all platforms instead... I would go so far as to say that expecting to build any non-trivial package (non-trivial = more than one source file, btw) from sources without having to install a thing is about the same as expecting the ability to edit TeX documents without installing some kind of text editor! It is *very* reasonable to try to make the MusiXTeX "binary" package (i.e. end-user package) not require a platform-dependent script for musixflx but extending that to the whole of the development process (and so cutting any useful tools available to assist) smacks of cutting off your nose to spite your face... which is what we in the UK are probably going to be doing in our referendum tomorrow ;o) David ------------------------------- TeX-music@tug.org mailing list If you want to unsubscribe or look at the archives, go to http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/tex-music
