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

[Gerben Wierda]

On Jan 5, 2007, at 19:36, Thomas Esser wrote:

> I see that several people have remembered that I
> am all against having duplicates in texmf trees. We can't really go 
> without
> them (e.g. language.dat), but the use of duplicates should only be done
> for a very good reason.
>
> kpathsea has a few tricks that allows us to do this to some extend. 
> But,
> it all only works if the setup is 100% right and it fails as soon as
> something is slightly wrong.

In te "me too" category, I want to support Thomas here. I have some 
experience in supporting users and I can tell you that stuff like this 
is a major source of trouble for users. This major source is only made 
even more troublesome because for years there will be outdated and 
wrong instructions flowing around on the web.

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.

G