bundling ghostscript in mingw32 installer

Benjamin Lindner lindnerben at gmx.net
Wed Jun 3 13:29:53 CDT 2009


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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