[OS X TeX] Xindy?

[Maarten Sneep]

On 9-jul-2006, at 12:35, Peter Dyballa wrote:

> Am 09.07.2006 um 01:30 schrieb Maarten Sneep:
>
>> _all_ I did was using the terminal to do the usual "./configure;  
>> make; make install" dance. I have the latest version of the  
>> developer tools installed (yes, the 930 MB disk image, or so). I  
>> did not specify anything to the configure stage. I am on a PPC  
>> machine.
>
> Quite like mine -- I only have LDFLAGS and CPPFLAGS regularly set  
> (sometimes CFLAGS also) that the many software packages find what  
> they depend on. The configure syntax can be troublesome (--with- 
> libfeature3-dir=<...>) -- and then some authors expect after the  
> equals sign exactly the place of that library, while others know  
> that libfeature3 is always in /<some starting components>/lib/ 
> feature3 so they are satisfied with /<some starting components> --  
> and that's the node where the C header (include) files can be  
> found, too. Putting these things into compiler flags avoids the  
> troublesome configure semantics (and syntax).

I didn't have to specify _any_ arguments to the configure script.  
AFAIK, xindy itself is not interactive, and you don't really want to  
use the included clisp, so all readline/ncurses stuff can be ignored.

> Your all-in-one package got troubled through these settings.  
> Removing them all, coming to your bare-bones set-up, made Xindy  
> compile and pass all tests over night in less than an hour,  
> although some "conftest" programmes crashed, configure failed a few  
> times, and readline was not found/is not used by Xindy. In the  
> afternoon I'll try some other variations.

Daring suggestion: dump fink, for the majority of packages it has  
outlived its useful life with the introduction of 10.4.

> This all-in-one package behaves much better than the RTE solo  
> package! Was it prepared for Mac OS X? Could be the bad Mac OS X  
> support comes from the fact that the developers do not have Macs  
> and are waiting for donations of some old hardware. And maybe there  
> have not been yet Mac OS X users.

No, the RTE could only be build with an old version of clisp (because  
of some modules needed by xindy), but this older version wouldn't  
compile at all on OS X. The required version caused headaches on  
other platforms as well, and a decision was made to streamline the  
lot, and freeze the required clisp version, so that maintenance could  
be performed by the xindy project itself. I did help with some  
testing and debugging to get to this stage. I'll report that the  
presence of fink may interfere with building xindy (at least that it  
is worthwhile to remove fink when building xindy, just to see if the  
issue goes away).

> There is one thing left: configure finds that only 7-bit file names  
> are supported! This might necessitate idx file names deviating from  
> the original TeX document's name ...

I'd say this is an insignificant issue. Yes, in theory, it should  
work, but really I don't give any guarantees that the rest of TeX  
will handle Unicode file names at all.

Maarten
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