[tex-live] mysterious mpost problem

Olaf Weber olaf at infovore.xs4all.nl
Wed Jan 19 14:13:51 CET 2005


Hans Hagen writes:
> Werner LEMBERG wrote:

>> Thanks for clarification.  How shall Joe User be able to resolve this?
>> I really hope that it can be fixed soon!

> the savest is in all cases to specify a -progname

Basically, the problem seems related to the way the code infers a
progname if the '-mem=foo' argument is given, and doesn't if '&foo' is
used. 

- A partial solution is to always require the -progname for tex, mf,
  mpost if a different progname than the name of the program is
  desired.  This is easy to implement, though it may break backward
  compatibility...  (Not that we're strangers to that; and I hope it
  would complete the cleanup of that part of the options interface.)

- For mpost in particular, it also appears that some values cannot be
  safely used from the texmf.cnf for an existing mem, and therefore
  should just be stored in the mem at dump time and used from there.
  This is easy enough for me to do, if someone can tell me which ones.

Storing the progname at dump in the mem file is not a solution for
this particular problem.

Explcitly specifying the progname option is safest.  The rule-of-thumb
is that -progname should be -mem name, and since -mem name is adopted
during runs not not during -ini, -progname needs to be explicit at
-ini.

-- 
Olaf Weber

               (This space left blank for technical reasons.)



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