Re: Cannot build gnuplot4.5 with lua terminal..

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Saturday 28 November 2009, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 20:15, Allin Cottrell wrote:

> > which is just a mess, and the installed sty file is not found by
> > TeX. I think the kpsexpand invocation should be more like:
> >
> > kpsexpand '$$TEXMF'/tex/latex/gnuplot
> 
> I never took a closer look at building scripts, but just a few remarks.
> 
> In my opinion it's not very "polite" of gnuplot to mess up the system
> installation of TeX (at /usr/local/whatever). It's much better to use
>     kpsexpand "\$TEXMFLOCAL/tex/latex/gnuplot"
> (Even better would be some less generic name than "gnuplot"; for
> example "gnuplot-lua".)

I have both tetex and texlive installed, but neither of them provides
a definition for TEXMF or TEXMFLOCAL or anything of the sort that I can find.
Who is expected to provide such a variable?  
What should gnuplot do if it is not defined (as it isn't on my machines)?

> On my system this resolves to
>     /usr/local/texlive/texmf-local
> or some other random location depending on my current environment
> settings (I'm usually switching between different TeX trees very
> often).
> 
> This is exactly what $TEXMFLOCAL has been designed for, $TEXMF should
> be kept for what TeX installer has installed and might be removed
> without a warning (if one upgrades or updates the distribution for
> example). You also need to keep in mind that there's a chance that
> this string is empty - in that case one should not install the sty
> file anywhere. And the absence of kpsexpand should not prevent one to
> build the terminal itself either.

It doesn't.
I have banished kpsexpand from my production machines because it floods
the error logs with garbage.  But they still configure, build, and run
gnuplot just fine.
 
> And then again ... Peter has almost ready a generic version of
> terminal (that also works with plain TeX and ConTeXt) that might have
> to go to
>     kpsexpand "\$TEXMFLOCAL/tex/generic/gnuplot"
> or even get split among several folders (generic, latex, context). Not
> yet at this moment, but just as a warning that this might need a
> change.

Well, I have had zero success in this area.  If you or someone else can
contribute patches to the build system to make it compatible with a
wider variety of TeX installations, that would be great.

I can tell you that as of this moment, all of the above proposed commands
will fail for me because TEXMFLOCAL is not defined, nor would I know what
to define it to.  So at the least I think we would need to include a 
short help message or tutorial on how to set this up.