[XeTeX] How to manually create the xelatex.fmt?

[Chris Travers]

On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 6:16 AM, Ulrike Fischer <news3 at nililand.de> wrote:
> Am Thu, 20 Oct 2011 13:32:00 +0200 schrieb Susan Dittmar:
>
>> Helping users with the day-to-day administrational
>> work was the main reason why linux distributions have been invented.
>
> Well this may have been the reason. And this is also the reason why
> package managers like the one from miktex has been invented (and I
> like the ease with which I can install packages today.)

Package managers have their roles to play.  They are important for
some users, less so for others.
>
> But looking at the discussion here *now* package managers in Linux
> distros are meant to prevent users to do fatal damage to their
> system, to avoid dramatic security problems, to avert chaos. They
> are no longer mainly a help, they are a mean of control.

And in some environments that is a win.   But keep in mind that none
of these package managers are synonymous with repositories.  I
understand there are TexLive 2011 repos for my distro of Fedora but I
can't develop on them because those are not available for RHEL 6.   I
don't know anyone who sticks with only the stock repositories.

However, when a piece of software also may handle credit card data
(which LedgerSMB sometimes does), the rules change very quickly.  The
credit card industry makes certain demands in exchange for the
privilege to process cards, and one of these is to stick with software
which gets security fixes from a vendor, and to stay current with all
security updates.  Saying that one should just install a new TexLive
distro every year might not even meet those demands, esp. when
everything is statically linked.

>
> It looks as if windows and linux have changed their roles:
> Long time windows users were the ones which were supposed to be so
> dump that they could only use applications which could be installed
> by simple click on a setup.exe and who must be protected from more
> complicated tasks. And everybody feared that windows would gain to
> much control over the applications installed on the user pc
> (microsoft got attacked when it dared to bundle a user application
> like the internet explorer with the OS). But now it looks as if the
> users of the so-called "open and free" OS Linux are tying themselves
> to their disto manufacturer and their installation tools in a way no
> windows user has ever been tyed to a windows OS.

You know, above, I think I said that there are only two really
acceptable ways to install lInux software:
1)  Via the distro's package manager (whether from the distro's repo,
from a third party repo, or third party download) or
2)  Compiling from source.

There are a lot of times when #2 makes more sense.  However it makes
PCI-DSS compliance quite a bit harder and more burdensome.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers