On Fri, May 04, 2012 at 09:44:22PM +0200, Zdenek Wagner wrote: > 2012/5/4 Apostolos Syropoulos <asyropou...@yahoo.com>: > > The question is: why keeping the tex binary when the pdftex binary can > > do the same things? If you throw away the tex binary, then you can > > get rid of most useless binaries that manipulate DVI files. > > > This is because you invoke pdfetex under the name tex, in other works, > you ask pdfetex to forget pdf output and e-TeX extensions and behave > as the old Knuth's TeX. Thus pdfetex does nothing but responds exactly > with what you asked for.
The `tex` binary in TL is Knuth's vanilla¹ TeX, not pdftex nor etex. ¹ not counting extensions like encTeX, MLTeX and other web2c changes -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex