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Asymptote in TeX Live 2009 ???

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Sam Burger

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Feb 25, 2009, 6:44:52 AM2/25/09
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Hello,

Do you think asymtote will finally be in TeX Live this year ?
It would really be a great thing !


Sam

Robin Fairbairns

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Feb 25, 2009, 11:53:50 AM2/25/09
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Sam Burger <samb@gmail> writes:
>Do you think asymtote will finally be in TeX Live this year ?
>It would really be a great thing !

unlikely, since tex live takes its material from ctan. i suggested
long ago that asymptote be submitted to ctan, but the people running
the project aren't keen. (we could mirror from sourceforge, but we
won't unless we're asked to -- it's a politeness thing.)

in fact, it's not entirely clear to me that it's appropriate as part
of a tex distribution -- is it really useless without tex? should it
not be part of an os "packages" distribution?
--
Robin Fairbairns, Cambridge

Will Robertson

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Feb 25, 2009, 9:44:56 PM2/25/09
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I suspect it is basically useless without TeX, since it uses it (or
LaTeX, or whatever) to typeset its labels. You could still draw figures
without labels, though :)

I also asked them to include it in TeX Live, but they didn't want to
for reasons that were beyond me. I hope with the re-invigoration of
MetaPost that someone will backport the 3D code from Asymptote somehow
and I'll go back to using MP. (Because it will be much more efficient
when LuaTeX contains its own MP library.)

Will

Michail Vidiassov

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Feb 26, 2009, 1:24:43 AM2/26/09
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On Feb 26, 5:44 am, Will Robertson wrote:
> I hope with the re-invigoration of
> MetaPost that someone will backport the 3D code from Asymptote somehow
> and I'll go back to using MP. (Because it will be much more efficient
> when LuaTeX contains its own MP library.)

I share the hope, but do not hold your breath.
Taco Hoekwater, currently the only one to work on metapost,
is not impressed by the idea and has no such plans.

Will Robertson

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Feb 26, 2009, 4:40:24 AM2/26/09
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I only heard that they weren't interested in doing the work themselves
(due to all the other work the LuaTeX team are doing) but they haven't
ruled it out for the future (perhaps with the proviso that someone else
has to port it across).

Will

Robin Fairbairns

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Feb 26, 2009, 12:44:51 PM2/26/09
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on the luatex list (i think it was) i've seen a "joint" pre-
announcement of the next sub-beta of luatex, together with another
release of mplib.

given that the context people are driving luatex, and that context
makes a big thing of metapost, it's hardly surprising to see them
marching (to some extent) in parallel.

and, btw, the big deal about adding something like asymptote to
texlive, is getting it to build for every platform that's supported in
texlive's config files. they basically don't want to build for
anything that doesn't autoconf reliably.

and of course, they restrict additions to the contents of ctan. which
rules asymptote out before it even starts.
--
Robin Fairbairns, Cambridge

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