[tex-live] ConTeXt formats

[Jonathan Kew]

On 11 Jan 2007, at 4:27 pm, Peter Münster wrote:

> Hello Jonathan,
>
> why did you reintroduce the ConTeXt formats in
> Build/source/texk/web2c/fmtutil.in ?
> I've understood from the discussion the last days, that the ConTeXt  
> formats
> should be generated by "texexec --make" and not by fmtutil.

The problem with this is that if a user, with a fresh TL installation  
and no pre-built formats, tries to run a trivial context job:

    texexec hello.tex

it will fail completely. Unfortunately, texexec isn't smart enough to  
check for format availability and build it if required.

In discussion with Karl over the past couple of days, we decided that  
to avoid this breakage, it was necessary to support context formats  
via fmtutil; moreover, fmtutil is patched so that it installs the  
formats in engine-specific subdirectories.

With the latest patch, the above command will still fail (fixing this  
would require additional work with a greater risk of disruption, and  
probably shouldn't be attempted now), but it will correctly build the  
format files. This means that if the user re-tries the texexec  
command, it will run successfully. Not ideal, but better than nothing.

Context users can still use "texexec --make" to pre-build the formats  
if they wish, of course. Or they can use "fmtutil --byfmt cont-en" or  
"fmtutil --all".

JK

>
> At the moment I'm preparing a texlive spec file for rpm, and I  
> prefer not
> to patch fmtutil.in if it's possible, that means, I would like to  
> avoid
> this:
> http://wiki.contextgarden.net/TeTeX_3.0_installation#Cleanup_fmtutil
>
> Thanks for adding $engine to texmf.in !
>
> Cheers, Peter
>
> -- 
> http://pmrb.free.fr/contact/
>