[tex-live] Having a .fmt for different engines

[Gerben Wierda]

On Jan 5, 2007, at 10:09 , Akira Kakuto wrote:

> Hi Gerben,
>
>>> Thomas will not want to change fmtutil to support engine.
>>> (See the past discussion.)
>>> Format files for ConTeXt shouldn't be made with fmtutil,
>>> they should be made with texexec --make ...
>>
>> That is not the issue. The issue is that format files made with xetex
>> are named cont-en.fmt and the ones made by pdftex are also named  
>> cont-
>> en.fmt but both engines will be stymied if they load the wrong one.
>>
>> So, there are three options:
>> 	- XeTeX uses another name, either another basename or another  
>> extension
>> 	- We use subdirs so the search path influences what gets loaded
>
> If you use texexec to make format files for ConTeXt, you will have
>
> web2c/pdftex/cont-en.fmt
> web2c/xetex/cont-en.fmt
> web2c/aleph/cont-en.fmt

Fine, but I would like to have this cleared up completely. TL2006  
includes XeTeX, which means that this is the time to get things right.

I am looking at LaTeX and ConTeXt

Situation now:
	fmtutil for latex and pdftex produces pdflatex.fmt
	fmtutil for latex and xetex produces xelatex.fmt
	fmtutil for cont-en and pdftex produces cont-en.fmt
	texexec for cont-en for pdftex produces pdftex/cont-en.fmt
	texexec for cont-en for xetex produces xetex/cont-en.fmt

Basically, we have two conflicting standards. We have a few options:
- Remove ConTeXt from fmtutil and handle it with texexec only, still  
two standards of doing things (name change and subdir change) but  
they are disjunct
- Go for extension. Use different extensions for formats that are  
incompatible. No problem that latex.fmt and pdflatex.fmt have the  
same extension (.fmt is for everything pdftex supports), but then  
xetex could use .xfmt until XeTeX and pdfTeX merge in one engine.
- Go for subdir
- God for name

I think specific names are more robust (get your search paths wrong  
and suddenly you get the wrong foo.fmt, whereas barfoo.fmt is unique.  
The same is true for different extensions.

G