[Mediawiki-l] Problem with the TeX installation on my webspace

[David Gerard]

On 30/12/2007, Steve VanSlyck <s.vanslyck at spamcop.net> wrote:

> While I understand what you are saying, I do not understand the problem.
> Nearly every windows program out there is issued pre-compiled, and
> surely there are as many different windows hardware configs as there are
> unix.


Frequently the people who write the software won't have access to the
commercial Microsoft compiling environment, and anyone with Cygwin
could run ./configure;make;make install as easily as anyone on Unix.
Windows is an utterly alien environment to the Unix way of doing
things; supporting Unix open source software properly on Windows - as
a reasonably bulletproof package - is something a project has to take
on seriously to do well, and most just don't have the resources.

This sort of thing is why we have distributions who maintain
dependency-resolving repositories ... and why the usual answer to "you
don't have x in your repository!" is likely to be "here are the steps
to become a maintainer."


- d.