[tex-live] Having a .fmt for different engines

Hans Hagen pragma at wxs.nl
Fri Jan 5 10:08:37 CET 2007


Philip & Le Khanh wrote:
> Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
>  >>>>>>"Norbert" == Norbert Preining <preining at logic.at> writes:
>  >
>  >
>  >   > It would be great to get fmtutil to this point where something
>  >   > like this is possible, considering that context canbe run with
>  >   > engines like xetex, aleph, pdftex, whatever, and all under the
>  >   > name cont-{en,fr,...}
>  >
>  > Hmm, I don't know whether subdirectories in web2c are a good
>  > solution.  Having different files with the same name on a system can
>  > be confusing too.  A few years ago this had been deprecated.  Did
>  > public opinion change?
>
> Isn't this why environment variables exist ?  I seem to recall
> that when we debated e-TeX methodology, I argued strongly for
> eTeX_Inputs, eTeX_formats and so on, just so that one /could/
> have duplicate filenames within a single system without there
> being a risk of conflict.  Provided that each executable has
> a matching set of logical names / environment variables, one
> can have as many files of the same name as one has executables,
> with each executable "knowing" where to look for its matching
> files ...
>   
we used to have fmt efmt ofmt nfmt etc and it was decided to stick to 
just fmt and use engine subpaths which is quite easy to support with

TEXFORMATS    = .;$TEXMF/web2c/{$engine,}

so, this variable thing is already there.

Hans



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