Re: ConTeXt on Debian: The wiki entry

[Taco Hoekwater <taco@elvenkind.com>]

Frank Küster wrote:
> 
>>>- Is it intended that context formats end up in $TEXMF/web2c/pdfetex/?
>>>  If yes, why is that so?  If not, we should rather find out why it
>>>  happens and fix it.
>>
>>Yes, it is. ConTeXt does not support only pdfetex, but all major
>>engines, like XeTeX and Aleph. I have formats in:
>>	
>>   $TEXMF/web2c/aleph/
>>   $TEXMF/web2c/luatex/
>>   $TEXMF/web2c/pdfetex/
>>   $TEXMF/web2c/xetex/
> 
> Ah, okay, that's clear.  Has this already been this way one year ago
> when texlive2005 was released?  Do you know whether the TeXlive
> developers are aware of that?

Yes, it was, Yes, 'they' were aware, and no, 'they' did not want to
fix fmtutil. 'They' only dropped the separate format extensions and
then decided that implementing a replacement was too much effort.

>>>- Why does it make a difference if the formats are created by fmtutil
>>>  instead of texexec (Except for the output directory)?  Should the
>>>  upstream packaging be changed so that fmtutil is never used, but
>>>  texexec, or should fmtutil be fixed to produce the same as texexec?  
>>
>>It is almost certainly better to ignore/block fmtutil and use texexec
>>instead. Properly setting up a ConTeXt update is not necesarily limited
>>to format generation only.
> 
> Hm.  What are the other things that need to be done?

Nothing at the moment, AFAIK. But potentially lots of things.

For instance: the next version of context will support non-kpathsea
file searching, so it will have to initialize its database somewhere.
It may want to/have to delete obsolete files  and/or merge local
configuration files with new released version. Or precompile patterns
files or lua scripts, strip and optimize source files, and perhaps
generate font metrics in one format or another.

ConTeXt comes with its own font map files, so there is no real
reason to fix updmap but if you want to the main problem is this:
you have to extend it so that it does not treat dvips and pdftex
map files as identical.


> To me, as a TeXlive and teTeX guy, it seems preferrable to choose option
> 1 and fix the existing distribution scripts.  However, I don't know yet
> what else is needed when ConTeXt is updated, therefore I might be wrong,
> and switching to texexec might actually be better.  But then this should
> be done consistently, and fmtutil should drop context handling
> completely (or just call texexec).

I am very much in favor of using texexec for everything related to
ConTeXt.

Greetings, Taco