[tex-live] Having a .fmt for different engines

Norbert Preining preining at logic.at
Sat Jan 6 00:33:39 CET 2007


Hi Karl!

On Fre, 05 Jan 2007, Karl Berry wrote:
> Regardless of the merits, I don't like the timing.  There is obviously a

Ok, this is clear. I see the point and to be honest I didn't expect it
to be included into TL2006/7.

> Finally, as for the merits, it is not clear to me what we (let alone the
> users) are gaining.  Like te and rk, I fail to understand the problem
> with using unique file names instead of subdirs.  That is the natural
> way to do things with stupid kpathsea.  Again, to me this seems the
> wrong time to even have the debate ...

Let's put it this way: There is the problem of generation the same
'formats' with different engines. Up to now all the format files are
placed in the same directories, which does not work with different
engines.

If we want to allow the multiple formats for multiple engines approach
than we have two options:
- put formats in web2c/$engine
- rename the formats to $format-$binname as te suggested

Both require non-trivial changes, although the later one with hacking
the kpathsea library seems to me more complicated, while the former can
be done by the patch Jonathan provided.

Of course all the problems you mentioned remain:
- not enough testing
- documentation

It's ok to leave it as it is now for this release, but I would suggest
to work on this area for the next release. It would be better to have
*ONE* tool for format generation, not two (texexec for ConTeXt, fmtutil
for the rest, and for those whishing to do something special nothing).

In fact till now I don't see the problem of duplication of files in the
texmf tree, but this is something different.

Allora, let keep the patch of Jonathan present for the next release!

Best wishes

Norbert

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Norbert Preining <preining at logic.at>                    Università di Siena
Debian Developer <preining at debian.org>                         Debian TeX Group
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