Re: [Mingw-users] latexmk under MSYS

[Vincent B. <vin...@ho...>]

[...]
>
> That sounds like a bug in latexmk: it should support MS-Windows by
> checking USERNAME instead.

That was my opinion indeed

>
> Why are you asking this here, rather than on the latexmk list?
>

In fact I had got in touch with latexmk maintainer in the first place,
he suggested that he could handle MSYS like a special case, as he 
already does that sort of things for cygwin. 

Then I decided to raise the issue on Mingw-users list for people to 
confirm that this is a latexmk issue --- not MSYS wrongly not setting
$USER. The aim of my email was also to get some guidance how to fix
this in latexmk if confirmed that the issue is there.


>> 3) And then the next question is how to detect that we are in the MSYS
>> case and that we can do this, in the cygwin case this viewer pid
>> detection function is disabled with the following perl code of
>> latexmk:
>
> To detect MSYS, you can test that $MSYSTEM is defined.
>

Good, that was that sort of information that is

>> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
[...]
>
> According to this, there is already a way for users to get this
> functionality to work, 
>
Yes, I agree, the simplest fix would be to do the same handling for 
MSYS as for cygwin --- ie disable the function otherwise than if 
hacking it with latexmk hooking mechanism.

> so I'm not sure what is still the problem.
>
I don't think there is any remaining problem after reading your 
suggestion on using $MSYSTEM.

Anyway, my opinion is that this is more of a perl problem than 
anything :  there should be some kind of standard perl module to detect
in a portable way what pid's are on the air whatever the environment is
(MSW, Linux, MSYS, etc...) and latexmk should delegate that work to 
this standard perl module rather than do it on its own.

   Vincent.