[tex-live] Having a .fmt for different engines
Gerben Wierda
Gerben.Wierda at rna.nl
Sat Jan 6 10:29:44 CET 2007
On Jan 5, 2007, at 19:36, Thomas Esser wrote:
> I see that several people have remembered that I
> am all against having duplicates in texmf trees. We can't really go
> without
> them (e.g. language.dat), but the use of duplicates should only be done
> for a very good reason.
>
> kpathsea has a few tricks that allows us to do this to some extend.
> But,
> it all only works if the setup is 100% right and it fails as soon as
> something is slightly wrong.
In te "me too" category, I want to support Thomas here. I have some
experience in supporting users and I can tell you that stuff like this
is a major source of trouble for users. This major source is only made
even more troublesome because for years there will be outdated and
wrong instructions flowing around on the web.
My personal preference is a change in ConTeXt. For ConTeXt, with its
separate texexec/texmfstart calling mechanism the engine is a variable
(but this is not reflected in the name of the formats). For XeTeX and
PDFTeX, the engine is a start and the macro set (Plain, LaTeX, etc.) is
a variable leading to variable format names.
G
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