Hi Ralf, hi Norbert, Frank Küster <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Frank Küster <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> Ralf Stubner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> >>> A general point: Recently I was thinking whether it would make sense to >>> change the behaviour of 'format providing packages' such as tetex-base >>> or jadetex: Right now they regerenate all formats, even though this is >>> not necessary. Why not have them regenerate only those formats they >>> actually provide? A simple way to achieve this would be to call >>> >>> fmtutil-sys --all --cnffile /etc/texmf/fmt.d/foo.cnf >>> >>> That way these packages would be more self contained and could not get >>> as easily broken by other packages. Of course, the 'binary providing >>> packages' such as tetex-bin would still have to regenerate all formats. >> >> I think that's a very good idea. [...] > Should we just go on and let tetex-base's and tetex-extra's postinst > call > > create_tetex_formats --all --cnffile /etc/texmf/fmt.d/01tetex.cnf > > I think that would help, too, at least with jadetex and friends. There's an other potential problem here. If a new tetex-base contains a change that requires the LaTeX formats to be regenerated, it might well be that other formats that preload LaTeX during format generation also need to be rebuilt. The same then is also true for a TeXlive based system. But somehow this seems to be a more general problem. Even a format that does not preload LaTeX might become unusable, and it might even require configuration file changes before it works again. Just imagine that it turns out that some hyphenation patterns are non-free and need to be removed. A package that keeps its own language.dat won't work any more. So should we simply ignore such potential problems, and go on with using --cnffile during format renewal? Or rather try to recreate all of them? We should also consider what the effect would have been for jadetex or xmltex users on the previous frequent bugs if we had already only regenerated our own formats. Hm, I guess they mostly were related to changes in tetex-bin, weren't they? Regards, Frank -- Frank Küster Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)
