MiKTeX Blog

Lots of updated packages have been commited to the repository. My todo list ist much shorter now :-) BTW, you will notice that we have reached a special version number: 2004 days since Jan 1, 2000 (as of June 27, 2005).

I will wait a few days before I create the public ISO image.

Now that the commandline-version of the package manager is near completion, I wonder how complicated is it to port the Windows (MFC) version to Linux?

I take into consideration these strategies:

1. Reimplement the application in C# (.NET), i.e., port it to Mono.
2. Rewrite the MFC application using one of the free portable GUI toolkits:
   • It seems that wxWidgets (fka wxWindows) would be the right choice, since it resembles the MFC framework.
   • Qt is a well designed toolkit. But it is unclear whether the Windows version of Qt will be released under GPL.
   • GTK+ is released under LGPL and claims to be object oriented, though it is written in C.

Shame on me! The last update distributes libpng 1.2.7. This version has "a bug that will cause applications that strip the alpha channel (while reading a PNG) to crash" (see libpng Home Page). The current version (1.2.8) fixes the bug. I will distribute it with the next update.

I am planning to make available the ISO image of the latest MiKTeX CD. Upload to the TUG server is planned for mid-June. It will be announced in the forum.

It seems that last night the package repository synchronization failed for some reason. The primary package repository (SunSITE.dk) is now the only repository offered by the update wizard. It contains the latest updates (as of June 3). All secondary repositories (CTAN) are outdated.