[tex-live] Outstanding question about Hebrew and Greek hyphenation patterns

[Philip Taylor]

My thanks to Reinhard, Mojca and Jonathan for attempting
to answer my outstanding queries.  I think just one part
is not yet clear to me :

>> 2) I would like to be able to install full support for Plain TeX (all
>> languages, all fonts, etc), but zero support for other formats.  What
>> is the correct combination of Collections/packages/schemes to
>> accomplish this, please ?
> 
> You cannot do it, at least not automatically. A package like
> hyphen-foo installs support for both plain TeX and LaTeX for all the
> engines (TeX, eTeX, pdfTeX, XeTeX, [LuaTeX], pTeX, ...) automatically.
> I don't know what to say about fonts because I don't imagine what it
> means to install a specific font for plain TeX, but not for LaTeX, but
> if you want to install hyphenation patterns just for plain TeX, you
> need to (force) uninstall all hyphen-foo packages and create your own
> language.def (probably in texmf-local) with all the languages you
> need. Now, this will still install support across different engines
> (pdfTeX, XeTeX, ... etc.) so if you only want it in plain XeTeX you
> need to make sure that you put language.def to a place where only
> XeTeX will find it (with a higher priority than the original one), for
> example TEXMF/tex/xetex/....

I think that "hyphen-foo" represents only the (acceptable) tip of the
iceberg; what I really want to avoid installing is any of the million-
and-one packages for LaTeX (and the thousand-and-one for the other
formats), since a full TeX Live installation including these takes
several hours.

Surely it is possible to instruct Install-TL to install Plain TeX
with all specific and generic support packages, but not to install
LaTeX and all its packages, Context and all its packages, and so on.
This is all I am seeking; surely I am not the only TeX Live user
who wants the fruit but not the expensive fancy packaging ?

** Phil.