[Info-vax] LaTeX etc. on VMS

[Phillip Helbig undress to reply]

In article <h0haujFl7jnU1 at mid.individual.net>, "Michael Kraemer @ home"
<M.Kraemer at gsi.de> writes: 

> 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 think that, theoretically, just a Pascal compiler was enough, though 
his web, tangle, and weave stuff would have been useful.

> I guess the hard work would be to disentangle the LaTeX core from all
> the additional tools to make a rudimentary build possible.

LaTeX and related stuff has always been portable.  One should separate 
the actual stuff, which should be portable, from OS-specific tools.