[tex-live] suggested cleanup of texlinks for {pdf,}cs{plain,latex}

[Vladimir Volovich]

Hi Petr,

the following 4 scripts are the only ones left in the TeX Live (and
teTeX) which still use shell script to call the TeX engine (with
the specific -progname and -default-translate-file options):

cslatex csplain pdfcslatex pdfcsplain

All other engines are using the symlinks to the TeX engine (most
commonly pdfetex).

> i have the following suggestion:
> 
> texlinks has a special case for the following four programs:
>   cslatex, csplain, pdfcslatex, pdfcsplain
> for which it creates a special script instead of a symlink.
> 
> on the other hand, fmtutil.cnf has the following rules for these
> formats:
> 
> #! csplain	pdfetex		-	-translate-file=cp227.tcx *csplain.ini
> #! cslatex	pdfetex		-	-translate-file=cp227.tcx *cslatex.ini
> #! pdfcsplain	pdfetex		-	-translate-file=cp227.tcx *csplain.ini
> #! pdfcslatex	pdfetex		-	-translate-file=cp227.tcx *cslatex.ini
> 
> so my question is: why not use symlinks for {pdf,}cs{plain,latex} just
> like for all other formats (some of which use -translate-file feature
> too)?
> 
> but note that the special-case scripts contain translate file il2-cs
> but not cp227.
> 
> so my proposal is:
> 
> 1) uncomment (and change) the lines in fmtutil.cnf in the following
>    way:
> 
> csplain		pdfetex		-	-translate-file=il2-cs.tcx *csplain.ini
> cslatex		pdfetex		-	-translate-file=il2-cs.tcx *cslatex.ini
> pdfcsplain	pdfetex		-	-translate-file=il2-cs.tcx *csplain.ini
> pdfcslatex	pdfetex		-	-translate-file=il2-cs.tcx *cslatex.ini
> 
>    (uncommenting them in TeXLive is necessary for automatic format
>    file creation, because we do have these links installed by default)
> 
> 2) remove special case for these formats from texlinks, thereby
>    changing them to plain symlinks instead of ugly shell scripts.
> 
> am i overlooking something which prevents us to do that?

Thomas Esser agreed:

 TE> I don't see any reason against this proposal and I suggest to
 TE> follow this.  One thing that I'd do, however, is to ask
 TE> Petr. Maybe, he wants to do some checks, adjust documentation
 TE> etc.

note that since the -translate-file setting during format generation
is, as far as i know, stored in the format file, this should have the
same effect as passing -default-translate-file during runtime.

What do you think?

May we proceed with changing these four scripts to symlinks:
  cslatex csplain pdfcslatex pdfcsplain
and making the above changes to fmtutil.cnf and texlinks?

Best,
v.