[tex-live] TeX Live 2008 testing - problems downloading

[Taco Hoekwater]

Hi

Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 3, 2008 at 1:02 AM, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
>> and thanks, Taco, for the Context
>> crash course.  If anybody wants to test it, check out rev 9175.
> 
> There are at least three more things that need to be fixed for ConTeXt:
> - texmfcnf.lua or or some similar file is missing (forgot the name,
> but I can check)

This file is not really needed, context will work fine without it.

> - any chance to set TEXFCACHE to something different than $HOME? one
> now gets $HOME/luatex-cache folder created, which I consider a bit
> ugly. I know that Norbert had dozens of requests for Hans, but it
> never got really resolved

Actually, just about the only reason for having texmfcnf.lua is for
setting up TEXMFCACHE. The TEXMFCACHE default is:

   TEXMFCACHE=$TMP;$TEMP;$TMPDIR;$TEMPDIR;$HOME;$TEXMFVAR;$VARTEXMF;.

so $HOME is already context's fifth attempt to get a temporary
directory.

I have no idea whether it is even feasible to set up a more sensible
value from texlive, without intimate knowledge of the local system.

Anyway, if that is possible: the file texmfcnf.lua is looked for in
the 'web2c' directories (the search logic is the same as for texmf.cnf).
It should be a lua script that returns a table containing texmf-style
variable(s) as keys. As I said, the only one that makes sense atm is
TEXMFCACHE.

My local one has:

   -- force the cache to the /tmp dir
   config = {}
   config.TEXMFCACHE = "/tmp"
   return config

If $TEXMFVAR is known to be writeable (if present), you could do

   -- force the cache to the /tmp dir
   config = {}
   config.TEXMFCACHE = "$TEXMFVAR;$TMPDIR"
   return config

etc. ?

> - modules for ConTeXt need to be imported

Mojca, are you or Patrick planning to take care of that?

Best wishes,
Taco