[tex-k] crippled TeX package

[Andrew Komornicki]

Karl and friends, 

this is regarding the recent post by Pierre. 
 
I have just checked several of my systems. 
Several months ago, I installed TeXlive2008 on a new laptop that runs 
Windows XP.  while the installation went quite well, and I am happy with 
all of the features, there is NO initex installed that I can find. 
This is TeXlive2008. 
 
More recently, I installed Fedora Linux on an older machine. The installation 
indicates that this is TeXlive2007.  From what I can tell both Fedora 9 and 
Fedora 10 provide TexLive2007.  Again all inquiries show that there is NO 
initex available. 

This was installed from the installation RPM's that Fedora provides.  I was 
also surprised to find that while the Windows TeXlive did provide a tlmgr 
utility (rather useful) the Fedora distribution did not have such a utility. 
All that I could find was the old utilities that are from the Thomas Esser 
teTeX distributions. (thank you Thomas !!) 

This is just my 2cents worth.  I still have an installation 
(thank you Fabrice) circa 1999-2000.  
This one does have initex (on Windows ) 

regards,
andrew

At 05:19 PM 7/19/2009, Karl Berry wrote:
>Hi Pierre,
>
>Sorry, what FC10 does is not up to us.  You'll have to ask them.
>Every distro likes to mess around with TeX in their own way.
>
>As you may know, TeX Live does include initex, but the fmtutil.cnf we
>use does not call initex, it ends up running "tex -ini" or "pdftex -ini"
>or whatever.
>
>I'll check what happens when our fmtutil is called on a nonexistent
>engine.  But I doubt Fedora is using an unmodified fmtutil anyway.
>
>Best,
>Karl