On Tue 08 Apr, Stacho Mudrak wrote:
After reinstalling therion on several computers several times, I agree, that installation process should be easier (without setting environment variables). It means doing following things:
1. Therion should automatically search for other executable files it is using, if it can not find them with default settings. This is not very difficult task, and would work on 90% of all computers, because we can assume, that thpdf and theps2pdf are located where therion.exe is. Perl and TeX usually works from command line on UNIX, on Win32, there are may be five common installations . . .
2. The THERION environment variable could be ignored, if we will assume some default location for therion library (e.g. /usr/share/therion or C:\Program files\therion\lib).
This already works on Debian Linux - The therion.ini file is not needed for a normal installation of survex and therion.
As far as I know, on Linux is standard /usr/share or /usr/local/share. Which would be better?
Check the LSB for details but on Debian /usr/share is the default place and local system overrides go in /usr/local/share, so check /usr/local/share first then /usr/share. I think that should be pretty standard everywhere now.
3. The TeX's (MPINPUTS and TEXINPUTS) could be probably written somehow to tex and mp file. I can write instead "input therion.tex" filename with the path "input /usr/local/share/therion/lib/tex/therion.tex". Than no TEXINPUTS is needed. Probably the same can be somehow done with MPOST.
This would work, but it seems 'better' to use the built-in config mechanisms unless it is difficult to make it work (in case you needed somehow to use the therion macros from an external TeX program - is that possible or likely?). The default non-packaged version of therion could keep it's /usr/{local}/share/therion/lib/ directory and use an explicit path but packaged versions (deb and maybe rpm) should probably just put the files in the right place.
Do you have any other ideas?
Putting the therion TeX macros into /usr/share/texmf/tex/therion works fine on Debian TeTeX so I will use that for the Debian version as it seems 'right'. This probably works on nearly all Linux systems. We may need to use explicit paths on some other unix systems? I've just uploaded the first official Debian Therion package (0.2.9-1) to the servers. It should go into the unstable distribution in the next few days. I'll do a 0.2.10 in a week or two. Wookey -- Aleph One Ltd, Bottisham, CAMBRIDGE, CB5 9BA, UK Tel +44 (0) 1223 811679 work: http://www.aleph1.co.uk/ play: http://www.chaos.org.uk/~wookey/