[tex-live] TL2004: Technical problems and testing

Olaf Weber olaf at infovore.xs4all.nl
Fri May 7 19:36:58 CEST 2004


Hans Hagen writes:
> Hi Olaf,

>> Given the amount of feedback I've had, I've mainly gone on my sense of
>> what would be useful, usable, and (I think) comprehensible.

> -)

>> - Currently, the code distinguishes between writing to the terminal
>> and log on the one hand, and other writes (\write) on the other.

> just curious: is \write16 the same as \message, or will \write16 act
> as any other write (which makes sense)

\write18 should be like other writes, not like \message.  Othewise it
becomes needlessly hard to use.

[...]

>> What I would like to do, is to use only three extensions: .fmt for
>> formats, .base for bases, and .mem for mems.  If we expect that
>> multiple engines will want to use the same format name, we can use a
>> construct like this
>> 	WEB2CDIR = .;{$TEXMF}/{$engine,}//
>> to get things sorted.  I've come to the conclusion that this kind of
>> occurrence ought to be rare, especially on systems using fmtutil, so
>> even that may be overkill.

> nice and extensible; it would -for context- mean:

> ../texmf/aleph/cont-en.fmt (cont-nl.fmt, cont-de.fmt etc)
> ../texmf/pdfetex/cont-en.fmt (cont-nl.fmt, cont-de.fmt etc)
> ../texmf/metapost/metafun.mem (mptopdf.mem)

> which is fine to me. I need to be able to distinguis between engines
> since the format name is kind of fixed for me.

> (i need to patch texexec but that's no big deal; i guess that also the
> -efmt switch will become -fmt then)

Exactly.

> maybe use 'format' instead of 'fmt' so that the new method is stressed

>> Having a single extension for formats would clean up some things, but
>> I do not feel strongly about it.  What I do feel strongly about is
>> that we should either using a single extension, or have each engine
>> use its own extension; at present we're doing neither as pdftex uses
>> .fmt and pdfetex uses .efmt.

> esp with combined engines in the end we will end up in problems;
> (there are also tex variants like xetex on the mac, which use xfmt)

-- 
Olaf Weber

               (This space left blank for technical reasons.)



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