retitle 338046 whizzytex: einitex unavailable from tetex and no longer functions. thanks
Hi, There is a change in tetex-3.0 Debian package which removes 'initex' 'einitex' commands, and requires 'tex -ini' instead. According to the maintainers, this is an upstream change, and other distributions will possibly follow. [About removing 'initex' symlink from package] > That wasn't a decision made by the Debian teTeX maintainers. I'm not > completely sure, but it was probably made by all the people that are > involved in creating teTeX, TeXlive and the web2c distribution > (i.e. what makes tex, pdftex, etc. compile on UNIX-like systems). Maybe > even people from MikTeX were involved. > > I don't know the reasons for this, therefore I ask you to talk with them > if you want to discuss this. (The texlive or tex-k lists should be a > good starting point.) The changelog/news files don't mention this change, and manpages still mention 'initex' etc., so this sounds like a premature change to make. Can you point out which mail address I should direct the question to. > >> First of all, I wonder when initex (or now, pdftex -ini) is used at > >> all. Usually formats should be generated in the postinst script, and > >> they should be defined by fmtutil.cnf snippets in /etc/texmf/fmt.d/. > >> This way it is guaranteed that, if there are changes in tetex-* that > >> require all formats to be rebuilt, this will be done in tetex-bin's > >> postinst. > > > > TeX source provided by user is processed by initex, and > > dumped, so that consecutive formatting is speeded up. > > Ah, I understand. But then I don't understand why the bug title is > FTBFS - and indeed I can compile it fine in a pbuilder environment. > Still the bug is very severe, of course, since it makes it unusable. > > >> Second, whizzytex hardcodes the extension for the format that is > >> generated. > > > > No, it doesn't hardcode, that's why it survived Debian sarge, where > > tetex generated 'efmt' and platex generated 'fmt'. > > Hm, why is there the following line in /etc/whizzytex/whizzytex.cnf: > > FMT=efmt > > I think you could extract the format extension with > > formatfile=$(basename `kpsewhich --format fmt latex`) > FMT=${formatfile#latex.} > > Thus if somebody changes the system to use some other engine for latex, > whizzytex will still work. Thanks for your tips, however tetex-bin 2.0.2-31 supposedly used efmt files; but it doesn't seem to return expected values: $ basename `kpsewhich --format fmt tex` tex.fmt $ basename `kpsewhich --format fmt latex` latex.fmt Ermm.. something is confused, I suppose. regards, junichi -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]