[tex-live] Having a .fmt for different engines
Hans Hagen
pragma at wxs.nl
Fri Jan 5 10:08:37 CET 2007
Philip & Le Khanh wrote:
> Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
> >>>>>>"Norbert" == Norbert Preining <preining at logic.at> writes:
> >
> >
> > > It would be great to get fmtutil to this point where something
> > > like this is possible, considering that context canbe run with
> > > engines like xetex, aleph, pdftex, whatever, and all under the
> > > name cont-{en,fr,...}
> >
> > Hmm, I don't know whether subdirectories in web2c are a good
> > solution. Having different files with the same name on a system can
> > be confusing too. A few years ago this had been deprecated. Did
> > public opinion change?
>
> Isn't this why environment variables exist ? I seem to recall
> that when we debated e-TeX methodology, I argued strongly for
> eTeX_Inputs, eTeX_formats and so on, just so that one /could/
> have duplicate filenames within a single system without there
> being a risk of conflict. Provided that each executable has
> a matching set of logical names / environment variables, one
> can have as many files of the same name as one has executables,
> with each executable "knowing" where to look for its matching
> files ...
>
we used to have fmt efmt ofmt nfmt etc and it was decided to stick to
just fmt and use engine subpaths which is quite easy to support with
TEXFORMATS = .;$TEXMF/web2c/{$engine,}
so, this variable thing is already there.
Hans
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