[tex-live] what is the canonical way to customize fmtutil.cnf

[Ingo Krabbe]

On Sun, Oct 10, 2010 at 08:27:03AM +0900, Norbert Preining wrote:
> On Sa, 09 Okt 2010, Ingo Krabbe wrote:
> > I generally use tex, pdftex etc. with encTex so I like to update the
> > fmtutil.cnf from texlive.  But I don't actually understand which files
> > are generated, might be updated and later taken into account by
> > fmtutil-sys or fmtutil-whatever.
> > 
> > So how would I modify these parts of texlive for my local needs?
> 
> Please read the tlmgr manual (help page, web page) and there the
> section on "generate". You can create a fmtutil-local.cnf and
> disable default formats there and add your own.

Hi Norbert,

lets discuss this a bit, as I'm an long time user of tex and unix
systems:

I have done as you propose, but I don't think that I got things set up
right.

tlmgr generate will only read the fmtutil-local.cnf if given on the
command line.  Its not clear to me if/which fmtutil-local.cnf will be
read automatically.

If there is no automatic detection of fmtutil-local.cnf, there is
actually no real use of tlmgr generate, as far as I can see.

I managed to add some formats but I wasn't able to modify existing
formats through fmtutil-local.cnf.  I haven't tried to disable existing
formats.  All that seems to be done by `tlmgr generate --localcfg
fmtutil-local.cnf' is the merging of files, that could also be done by
`cat $P1/fmtutil.cnf $P2/fmtuil-local.cnf > $D/fmtutil.cnf' which is far
to few function for a tool that needs some manual page to be read.

As far as I can see now, tlmgr generate is ok for distribution.  Later
modifications can be done much faster and more reliable through:
`fmtutil --cnffile=$(kpsewhich
--var-value=TEXMFLOCAL)/web2c/fmtutil-local.cnf) --all)'

I tried #!format to disable formats.  Maybe this is a bug, but for me it
currently looks as a tool of big obfuscation and uselessness.

regards,
ingo