[Axiom-developer] RE: windows/linux coherency

[Page, Bill]

On Monday, December 20, 2004 3:55 AM address@hidden
wrote:
> 
> On 19 Dec 2004 at 16:40, address@hidden wrote:
> 
> > I would like to complete the new version of Rosetta CD for 
> > Windows by adding Axiom + WinTeXmacs, executable directly
> > from the CD.
> 
> If my proposal seems too Windows-specific or too complicated 
> to implement or inadequate, the minimum I would need for the
> Rosetta CD would be the possibility for tm_axiom.exe to read
> whether it must use texbreaker or not, from a user writable 
> place, so either from a file in USERPROFILE or ALLUSERSPROFILE
> directories, or from memory through an environment variable
> TM_AXIOM containing some instruction specific to your version,
> say "texbreaker=y" or "texbreaker=n", or anything you find 
> appropriate, and silently ignore anything else to eliminate 
> the possibility of some other program defining also a TM_AXIOM
> env var.

Yes, either alternative would be easy to implement in tm_axiom.
Would you consider manually setting or changing an environment
variable "too difficult" for the average Windows user? If not
then I think that is the best way to go. I can arrange to set
this variable to some default during installation on Windows.
How would you control this when running Axiom directly from
CD?

> Otherwise, I would have to put all Axiom in texmacs/plugins/axiom
> because Andrei Grozin's (cygwin) tm_axiom seems not to read
> the AXIOM env var, or add its location to the PATH, which
> I prefer to avoid, as it is a source of potential problems
> (in my opinion). Technically, putting Axiom in a TeXmacs
> subdir is sufficient to have a working Rosetta CD, but it
> would be more satisfactory to be able to put it in a more
> logical place.
> 

I agree that it is undesirable to put all of Axiom in a
sub-directory of the TeXmacs tree.

If the new tm_axiom consults the TM_AXIOM environment variable
and finds

  TM_AXIOM=texbreaker:n

then it can be made to behave exactly the way the cygwin
tm_axiom does now.

Regards,
Bill Page.