[tex-live] tl-pretest: bug in .ini files

[Joseph Wright]

On 14/04/2016 09:23, Petr Olsak wrote:
> 
> There is another aspect not discussed yet. If a user looks into an ini
> file and sees \input pdftexconfig then his/her first idea is: what this
> file does do? And he/she looks into pdftexconfig.tex. When the original
> format is here then avarage user needs two seconds to understand it
> because there are only nine clear and understandable lines. He/she can
> copy it to the working directory, modify values and re-generate format,
> for example. Or he/she can set these values in the document directly. We
> call this situation: "simplicity is power". On the other hand, if there
> is pdftexconfig.tex as suggested, average user is lost. He/she don't see
> the reading process of pdftexconfig.dat because this is not mentioned in
> .log nor on terminal when generating format.
> 
> I know many TeX users, I am consulting TeX problems on email continuosly
> (hundreds emails of this type per year), so I know, what avarage user is
> able to understand. And I know that there are many various methods of
> using pdfTeX, not only with eTeX enabled and with etex.src loaded. And,
> of course, not only LaTeX:).
> 
> I vote to keep simplicity, i.e. the pdftexconfig.tex can look like:

As noted in another mail, in the end this comes down to what works for
the TeX Live team. I can arrange to load such a file for LuaTeX (and
other cases) but need to know that they would be happy. Norbert has
already indicated that he'd rather not have to deal with further changes
in the data format (even though this would be going back to a form from
a few years ago).

Joseph