[tex-live] ConTeXt formats

Gerben Wierda Gerben.Wierda at rna.nl
Fri Jan 12 00:40:17 CET 2007


On Jan 11, 2007, at 17:58 , Jonathan Kew wrote:

> On 11 Jan 2007, at 4:27 pm, Peter Münster wrote:
>
>> Hello Jonathan,
>>
>> why did you reintroduce the ConTeXt formats in
>> Build/source/texk/web2c/fmtutil.in ?
>> I've understood from the discussion the last days, that the  
>> ConTeXt formats
>> should be generated by "texexec --make" and not by fmtutil.
>
> The problem with this is that if a user, with a fresh TL  
> installation and no pre-built formats, tries to run a trivial  
> context job:
>
>    texexec hello.tex
>
> it will fail completely. Unfortunately, texexec isn't smart enough  
> to check for format availability and build it if required.
>
> In discussion with Karl over the past couple of days, we decided  
> that to avoid this breakage, it was necessary to support context  
> formats via fmtutil; moreover, fmtutil is patched so that it  
> installs the formats in engine-specific subdirectories.

So at this stage I will have to recheck all my scripts to see if they  
are ware that now fmt's are created in a different location and I  
have also to be aware that if this is a upgrade, people may have  
older .fmts in the previous web2c-without-subdir location.

> With the latest patch, the above command will still fail (fixing  
> this would require additional work with a greater risk of  
> disruption, and probably shouldn't be attempted now), but it will  
> correctly build the format files. This means that if the user re- 
> tries the texexec command, it will run successfully. Not ideal, but  
> better than nothing.
>
> Context users can still use "texexec --make" to pre-build the  
> formats if they wish, of course. Or they can use "fmtutil --byfmt  
> cont-en" or "fmtutil --all".

So in fact you fix texexec via fmtutil? I wished you had not.

G


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