[Info-vax] LaTeX etc. on VMS

[Michael Kraemer @ home]

Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) wrote:
> In article <312349fd-0c91-4dde-81b7-0c610d60918e at googlegroups.com>,
> Richard Levitte <richard at levitte.org> writes: 
> 
> 
>>https://www.tug.org/texlive/
>>
>>TeX Live seems to be *the* dist du jour.
>>
>>I have no idea whatsoever what kind of work is needed to bring it up to speed on VMS.  It might be simple, it might be a major pain in the darker regions...  I wish I had the time, but sadly, I'm already majorly sucked in elsewhere.
> 
> 
> Thanks for the reply.  But if YOU can't find the time, who can?
> 
> I don't think that it is actually that much work.  One needs someone who
> is familiar with LaTeX on VMS and with modern distributions.  Or one of
> each: someone who is familiar with LaTeX on VMS, and someone who else is
> familiar with modern distributions. 
> 
> Patrick Daly is someone well known in the LaTeX world who uses, or used 
> to use, LaTeX on VMS.  Lamport was, IIRC, working at DEC when he 
> developed LaTeX; maybe he developed it on VMS, I don't know.  It is 
> famously very portable, so a "port" can't be that big an effort.
> 

The crucial point here seems to be the amount of gnu/linux crap which 
has crept into the original distro. I can't imagine that Knuth/Lamport
needed C++11 or autoconf to build LaTeX back then.
I guess the hard work would be to disentangle the LaTeX core from all
the additional tools to make a rudimentary build possible.