[tex-live] Fwd: files generated by fmtutil/updmap -- platform independent?

[T T]

On 22 August 2010 19:10, Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard <mpg at elzevir.fr> wrote:
> I'm not sure about map files, so I won't discuss them. Concerning ls-R files, at
> first glance, it seems doable to update them without re-scanning the whole tree,
> which is indeed quite expensive due to disk access. Actually, one could even
> imagine generating the ls-R files for TEXMFMAIN and TEXMFDIST from texlive.tlpdb.

The same thought occurred to me (except I thought about using .tlpobj files).

> The main problem could be people changing files here and manually running
> mktexlsr afterwards. We can't always assume people do things the right way.

That wouldn't be a problem if done with explicit switch to mktexlsr,
like --add-tlpobj foo.tlpobj.  But this only makes sense if we finally
get around to rewrite mktexlsr in Perl.  Then we could reuse our TL
modules and perhaps end up with a nice and concise implementation
(although, probably not as concise as ~20 lines long ;)

> I'm not saying it's worth it, I have no definite opinion on that right now, but
> it seems technically doable.

Right.  It would make sense to do some measurements first to see where
the actual bottlenecks are and how much the can be optimized.  The
whole thing might turn out just not worth it.  On my (partial) TL
installation running updmap & fmtutil -all & mktexlsr takes 10 sec
(warmed up) and a few sec more on cold system, so speed was never an
issue for me.

> By the way, the formats (fmt files) definitely need to be regenerated (I'm
> probably stating the obvious, but anyway).

It's not obvious to me, but I never really looked into this.

>> If it's currently difficult to do, maybe tweaking the file formats to make
>> things simpler is the best idea ?
>>
> Well, simplifying the way map entries are handled would definitely be great, but
> that would be an ambitious project. (Which doesn't mean it shouldn't be done,
> but it would definitely require consequent work and careful thought.)

I don't even have a clue what is the problem now (never looked into
that either).

Cheers,

Tomek