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bundling ghostscript in mingw32 installer


From: Benjamin Lindner
Subject: bundling ghostscript in mingw32 installer
Date: Wed, 03 Jun 2009 20:29:53 +0200
User-agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.18 (Windows/20081105)

Hello list,

As the print.m script has nicely be tuned up for the 3.2 release it now supports printing to pdf via ps and ps->pdf using ghostscript.
This also works well under windows.

The question for me arises: should a ghostscript binary be bundled with the mingw32 installer?

As there is a GPL version of ghostscript available, I guess it should not cause licensing issues if a binary version is packed into the installer. Building ghostscript from source under windows is not really straightforward from what I saw looking at the build process. So I'd prefer to pack a binary version, if any.

Or it is simply not bundled into the installer, but the user is advised to get it and install it sperately if printing to pdf is required.

I tend to vote for bundling it.
Pro: pdf printing works out-of-the-box with gnuplot which does not have the pdf terminal. Con: larger installer, yet another dependency, slightly more work when bundling (however, this should be a one-time-only effort, well, more or less)

What do you think?

benjamin



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