Re: ConTeXt on Debian: The wiki entry

["Frank Küster" <frank@kuesterei.ch>]

Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl> wrote:

[ horror story snipped ]
> anyhow, by now, no alias file should be present in any tex root any 
> more; it was a bad idea anyway

I always thought that the purpose of the aliases file was that a
non-existent (no, nay, never, nowhere ever) filename was aliased to an
existent one, like in the documentation part:

% documentation
TETEXDOC.pdf teTeX.pdf
etex-man.pdf etex.pdf
pdftex-a.pdf pdftex.pdf
testeuro.dvi eurosym.dvi

If the rest of the aliases covers files that might exist as real files
on some systems - I agree, what a bad idea.

> pool files normally are in web2c paths; future versions of pdftex and 
> mpost have the pool file embedded so this problem will (hopefully) disappear

Ah, I didn't know that.  pdftex 1.40 doesn't have this already, has it?

> hm, interesting; lean and mean texmf.cnf files can speed up things a lot
>
> when playing with luatex (where i intend to replace kpse completely with 
> a lua based variant) it is possible to have format specific file 
> databases; this runs much faster; this whole ls-r stuff is pretty outdated

Oh, yes, it is.  Current kpse also has the "side effect" that on most
systems, users are able to fill up the /var/ partition by generating
pixel fonts...  

Karl (or was it Olaf?) once said there are plans for a complete
replacement of libkpathsea, named kpse - would that be obsolete with
luatex?  Could there be a C wrapper about lua's kpse?

> sure, but (i'm not sure if this is still true) running tex live 
> alongside a tetex was always kind of problematic due to path settings 
> and this autoparent mess then deriving locations of texmf.cnf from it

This is probably still a problem in standard-setup systems.  

Regards, Frank
-- 
Dr. Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)