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

[Gerben Wierda]

On Jan 6, 2007, at 10:55, Taco Hoekwater wrote:

> Gerben Wierda wrote:
>> My personal preference is a change in ConTeXt. For ConTeXt, with its 
>> separate texexec/texmfstart calling mechanism the engine is a 
>> variable (but this is not reflected in the name of the formats). For 
>> XeTeX and PDFTeX, the engine is a start and the macro set (Plain, 
>> LaTeX, etc.) is a variable leading to variable format names.
>
> The format names used to be different, thanks to the different
> extension used by the various engines. This feature was removed
> for web2c in favour of $engine, but support for that was never
> implemented in the tetex/texlive tools, resulting in suddenly
> identical filenames.  Don't go blaming context for that!

I am not blaming ConTeXT and I think I did not participate in the 
earlier discussions though I think I would have sided with Thomas.

Basically, I think the different-names (either basename, or extension) 
is more robust than identical names in different directories. Given 
that we are not getting the different extensions back, how difficult 
would it be to let ConTeXT use a different names strategy comparable to 
the current rest? E.g.

	xtx-cont-en.fmt
	pdf-cont-en.fmt

G