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

[Philip & Le Khanh]

Thomas Esser wrote:

 > How about changing all tools to generate
 > 	$format-$engine.fmt
 > (or even $format-progname.fmt)

There is one program that you cannot change to
achieve this, and that is TeX itself.  TeX is
defined to produce foo.fmt when iniTeX is asked
to process and dump foo.tex

I really cannot see why any TeX derivative
performing the same sequence should not also
produce foo.fmt, and the search paths for
that derivative be defined such that the
correct foo.fmt is loaded by TeX or any
derivative thereof.  The logical name /
environment variable mechanism, together
with program-specific sub-directories,
seems to me to accomplish everything necessary,

Of course, like all other contributors to
this thread, I would not want TeX Live 2006
to be delayed just to permit this change.

* Phil.