Re: updating ConTeXt to latest on openbsd-current Q #2

[Taco Hoekwater <taco@elvenkind.com>]

Hi there!

frantisek holop wrote:
> my second question, is more like asking for pointers...
> 
> where can i read more about fmtutil, and how come that
> context does not use it when (i assume) pdftex does?

The following comes from a thread in december about this same
issue. The full thread is here:

http://archive.contextgarden.net/message/20051213.100910.f7bb2779.en.html

Posted by Taco Hoekwater (hey, that's me!):
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Here's what happened. In the "really old" days,
formats ended with .fmt, like plain.fmt.

When etex and omega came around, they identified themselves by having
e.g. plain.efmt (note the extra "e"), so that they could coexist
happily.

However, this cluttered the build system quite a bit, so recently it
was decided to drop the extra characters. At that time, it was
understood that there would be an extra subdirectory below texmf/web2c
to differentiate between the different engines (at least, that is what
Hans and I gathered from the discussion). So you would have, e.g.
"web2c/pdfetex/cont-en.fmt" as well as "web2c/omega/cont-en.fmt".

But it turned out that since LaTeX has separate names for the
different formats anyway (Lambda etc.), ConTeXt was the only client
of this new feature, and Thomas Esser decided that it was not worth
the effort to support these extra directories.

However, for ConText it would be very, very unwieldy to have
cont-pdfetex-en.fmt, cont-xetex-en.fmt, cont-aleph-en.fmt etc., each six
or seven times. And because context is always called through texexec,
the latest texexec's implement this engine subdirectory functionality
for you.

Finally, what goes wrong: unless you either delete the teTeX-supplied
context formats or change texmf.cnf, the old formats will be found first
by kpathsea.
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