[tex-live] fmtutil --byengine ?

Norbert Preining preining at logic.at
Thu Aug 13 01:14:47 CEST 2009


Hi Dan,

> But nothing like
>   --byengine <engine name>

Will be done soon.

> At present, when pdftex is updated, tlmgr runs fmtutil several
> times, once for each name in a list of formats. This list of
> format names does NOT seem to be drawn from fmtutil.cnf, since
> it includes several disabled formats. It also skips my private
> formats, which are indeed present in fmtutil.cnf and depend on
> pdftex.

Did you *disable* formats by hand? That is not supported, and in fact
any update to a package with format definitions will destroy your
manual changes.

Sorry, format configuration is not supported in that detail.

What is indeed not done is that the actual fmtutil.cnf file is 
consulted, but only the texlive.tlpdb and all formats depending 
on the engine are rebuild. That is fine in principle because 
tlmgr will regularly re-create fmtutil.cnf from the data in the
texlvie.tlpdb plus fmtutil-local.cnf, and on the way will destroy
all manual configuration (which is documented in tlmgr).
(this is in contrast to updmap.cfg where tlmgr will keep since
it is only using --enable and --disable).

As soon as we have --by-engine in all builds I can switch tlmgr 
to use that instead of working through the texlive.tlpdb, which will
make the update work as you expect with the exception that still
manually disabled formats will be re-activated by tlmgr when 
regenerating the fmtutil.cnf (please see tlmgr --help generate)

Best wishes

Norbert

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Norbert Preining <preining at logic.at>        Vienna University of Technology
Debian Developer <preining at debian.org>                         Debian TeX Group
gpg DSA: 0x09C5B094      fp: 14DF 2E6C 0307 BE6D AD76  A9C0 D2BF 4AA3 09C5 B094
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
AGGLETHORPE (n.)
A dispute between two pooves in a boutique.
			--- Douglas Adams, The Meaning of Liff


More information about the tex-live mailing list