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

[Taco Hoekwater]

Jonathan Kew wrote:
> PS: About to send, but just seen Taco's message "Don't go blaming  
> context...". True. It's not a question of figuring out who to blame,  
> but of looking at the big picture and finding the best way forward  from 
> where we are. I think, on balance, that a change within ConTeXt  would 
> provide the best solution at the least overall cost. Then  fmtutil can 
> maintain the ConTeXt formats alongside others without  other 
> infrastructure changes.

All of this doesn't matter much, because:

Even if Context was changed, and that would be done right this
instant, it would still be considered too late for TeXLive 2006,
yes? So whatever happens now, would end up being postponed to
TeXLive 2007 anyway.

But by next year, there will be format-specific Lua files inside
ConTeXt, and those will need to be byte-compiled at format generation
time. I consider it very unlikely fmtutil will support that sort
of 'at-the-side processing'.

Therefore, letting the ConTeXt formats be handled by texexec instead
of fmtutil sounds to me like the best option. An extra advantage of
that is that it does not need special attention from the TeXLive
team, because texexec already has a workaround to deal with the lack
of engine support in tetex.

> Another option is to do nothing, and let ConTeXt formats be managed  
> entirely separately from the others. However, I think this will tend  
> to leave ConTeXt somewhat marginalized in the TeX Live world, which  
> would be regrettable. I'd like TeX Live to be much more than just  
> LaTeX Live. :)

Making ConTeXt behave more and more like LaTeX just so that it is
easier to include in TeXLive, does not truly make TeXLive any less
LaTeX-centric, I think.

Best,

Taco