[tex-live] automatic format generation for context

Hans Hagen pragma at wxs.nl
Fri Jun 13 13:29:08 CEST 2008


Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> Besides, Hans wants to get rid of kpathsea. Of course that doesn't
> meant that it could not be different on TeX Live, but I guess that
> nobody took any time to implement it that way.
> 
> Again - the only real problem is luatools & mtxrun, and for the two of
> them you should not use kpathsea. Again, it's doable in some way, but
> ask Taco or Hans for details if you want to contribute. It would be
> really nice if the two scripts would be updated automatically from the
> latest texmf tree, but I have no knowledge in this area.

luatools and mtxrun should not be called using kpse (actually in a 
minimal setup there is not even an kpsewhich and friends needed)

luatools and mtxrun are used with luatex/context mkiv which does not use 
kpse at all and they are self contained scripts (updating can be done 
with luatools --selfupdate and mtxrun --selfupdate)

also using kpsewhich as locator would also sacrifice speed since then 
the lsr databases need to be loaded etc etc which in a normal mkiv run 
is not needed; for mkiv luatools == kpsewhich++ and mtxrun == texmfstart

the same is true for a luatex/context run ... it doesn't use kpse

the other scripts that come with context mkiv (mtx-blabla.lua) are run 
indirectly with "mtxrun --script blabla <rest of arguments)" which is 
another reason why mtxrun is its own stub; the only shortcut there is 
currently the "context" command which is "mtxrun --script context <other 
arguments>" and the prefered way of running context mkiv (it then 
replaces texexec -- for instance index sorting and such takes place 
inside tex itself)

so, to summarize:

on windows:

stubs: luatools.cmd mtxrun.cmd context.cmd, they launch the related lua 
scripts in the same path)

on unix:

stubs: context (calls mtxrun ...)
renamed scripts: luatools and mtxrun
or also stubs: luatools and mtxrun that call lua script in same path


Hans

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