[tex-live] trouble starting context on latest tl2008 developer snapshot

Norbert Preining preining at logic.at
Mon Jul 7 16:53:19 CEST 2008


Hi Taco!

First of all, thanks a lot for testing all this. It is a huge help.

On Mo, 07 Jul 2008, Taco Hoekwater wrote:
> I ran the networked installer in a virtual box running suse 11, and
> initially, my virtual box screen size was 800x600. That does not
> combine with the -gui option of install-tl: the Tk window simply
> doesn't display the bottom part of the installation screen.

I know. But I have NO idea how to work around that in a portable
Unix/Win32 way. But then, as you said, 800x600 ... welll .....

> maybe it would be better to give a message and abort or fall back
> to the non-gui version instead of drawing a useless window?

If you can tell me how to get the screen dimensions from Perl/TK, yes
;-)

> I first installed the 'texlive scheme for context', and later a 'texlive
> full' as well. In both cases, the download and installation went fine,

Good to hear!

> no problems at all. It looks like the 'context' scheme installs a fair
> number of packages that are not actually needed by context users, but

That is probably due to the fact that 
	scheme-context
pulls in
	collection-context
	collection-metapost
	collection-xetex
and those in turn

collection-context:
	(bin-)context
	jmn
	lmextra
	collection-basic	(!!!)

collectiont-metapost
	loads of metapost packages

collection-xetex
	many packages, too

If you want to reduce this please we can work on that. But we need
suggestions. Maybe Mojca want to .... ;-))))

> After installation was complete, I had to fiddle a bit to get the
> binaries included in the path, I am not sure whether that is supposed
> to be handled by the installer or not?

Windows or Unix?

On Windows it shoul dwork out of the box. Ok, you have to restart a new
cmd instance.

On Unix there is the option to add symlinks into standard directories.

In any case NOTHING is changed on Unix wrt $PATH. It never has been that
way anyway.

>   texexec test
> and
>   texexec --xtx test
> 
> both ran out of the box, excellent! This is already better than ever.

Fine. Yes. I had to fix fmtutil to work with double cont-en lines
(pdftex/xetex), but now it works. We have activated pdftex and xetex
based context formats immediately.

> However, context+luatex did not run. The problem was that the

Not surprising.

> installation does not create the link for "mtxrun" in the binaries
> directory, so I had to do that manually. It did create the other
> two script links ("context" and "luatools"), only "mtxrun" was missing.
> But "context" is a shell wrapper that runs "mtxrun -script context",
> so the "context" command was broken as well.  I just copied "luatools"
> to "mtxrun" and edited it to change luatools.lua into mtxrun.lua, that
> was good enough.

Ok, so that boils down to:
- for unix: link luatools.lua and mtxrun.lua to $bindir (without .lua)
  (that is not installation time thing, but should be done in the 
  svn repository)
- for win32 we use a .bat wrapper for starting texlua files, that should
  work for mtxrun and luatools, too.

Anything else? I didn't understand you completely. Do we have to have
all three (context, mtxrun, luatools) in the $bindir-s, or only a subset
of those?

> There is a bit of post-install work that is needed for context+luatex 
> that is not done by the installer, I ran those two commands by hand:

That can be added. We have a general post installation action system set
up. So if we need that, we can do that.

> First
>   luatools --generate
> (this sets up the texmf cache)

Where does it put the cache?

> Second
>   context --make --compile cont-en
> (this creates the format inside said cache)A

Ok.

> Jesse, can you please try my recipe to make sure I got it right?

Please report back, Jesse, and I will try to implement that in the
repository.

Best wishes

Norbert

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Norbert Preining <preining at logic.at>        Vienna University of Technology
Debian Developer <preining at debian.org>                         Debian TeX Group
gpg DSA: 0x09C5B094      fp: 14DF 2E6C 0307 BE6D AD76  A9C0 D2BF 4AA3 09C5 B094
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