Taco, Hans,
thanks for your reactions. And I see that Taco speaks from (bad)
experience. I have always fiddled around and tried to make ConTeXt
work in the linux distros i have tried so far (since I'm on ppc,
there were four of them: gentoo, fedora, ubuntu, suse), but have
never made any systematic approach. I'm really grateful for Taco's
explanations; this helps me a lot.
On Dec 13, 2005, at 11:55 AM, Taco Hoekwater wrote:
I believe this is quite hard, because every distribution has a
slightly different teTeX setup. My view was: if you want an up-to-date
ConTeXt, start out fresh. Otherwise, you can save yourself an enormous
hassle by learning to live with an outdated system.
:-)
If you want to spend time on this, then kudos to you, but I have
given up on the distribution-supplied TeX's altogether.
Now you often still have a broken ConTeXt distribution, even if you
can get 4. to work, because you also need the latest latin-modern
font distribution.
And for that, you have to make another set of changes to texmf.cnf
because the older latin-moderns used different paths and filenames
for just about everything, and you have to make sure the new ones
are found. And don't forget that you probably have to fix updmap's
config file as well to make sure dvips remains working.
You'll also still have a rather outdated pdftex and metapost, but
I guess that is not really a big deal for most people.
OK, what about that: my aim would be to have one up-to-date ConTeXt
installation in TEXMFLOCAL and leave everything else pretty much
untouched. One could easily add a step to unzip cont-lmt.zip into
TEXMFLOCAL as well. I've done it and it doesn't appear to break
things with other TeX programs (disclaimer: I use pdf*tex
exclusively, so I don't know about dvips).
That solution is fine. Here's what happened. In the "really old" days,
formats ended with .fmt, like plain.fmt.
When etex and omega came around, they identified themselves by having
e.g. plain.efmt (note the extra "e"), so that they could coexist
happily.
However, this cluttered the build system quite a bit, so recently it
was decided to drop the extra characters. At that time, it was
understood that there would be an extra subdirectory below texmf/web2c
to differentiate between the different engines (at least, that is what
Hans and I gathered from the discussion). So you would have, e.g.
"web2c/pdfetex/cont-en.fmt" as well as "web2c/omega/cont-en.fmt".
But it turned out that since LaTeX has separate names for the
different formats anyway (Lambda etc.), ConTeXt was the only client
of this new feature, and Thomas Esser decided that it was not worth
the effort to support these extra directories.
However, for ConText it would be very, very unwieldy to have cont-
pdfetex-en.fmt, cont-xetex-en.fmt, cont-aleph-en.fmt etc., each six
or seven times. And because context is always called through texexec,
the latest texexec's implement this engine subdirectory functionality
for you.
Finally, what goes wrong: unless you either delete the teTeX-supplied
context formats or change texmf.cnf, the old formats will be found
first
by kpathsea.
OK, then one step would be: find the old .fmt files and delete them.
The strangest ones are the ~/.texmf-var ones, where
fmtutil and updmap dump their stuff. They are documented in
/usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf
OK, will RTFM. One final thought: I remember reading an article (by
Siep? in MAPS?) that having more than one texmf.cnf wasn't too
difficult. Would that be an option I should try? Having one which
just lets all the defaults provided by the distribution and one (set
via an environment variable) which will put TEXMLOCAL before anything
else?
Thanks, and best
Thomas
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