Bug#62271: pdftex.fmt <-> pdfetex.efmt and German hyphenation.

[Denis Barbier <barbier@imacs.polytechnique.fr>]

On Wed, 12 Apr 2000, Andreas Krüger wrote:

> Package: tetex-bin
> Version: 1.0.6-4
> 
> I am one of these rare animals: A plain TeX user.
> I tried to combine \input ngerman.sty with pdfetex.
[...]
> As I found out looking at /var/lib/texmf/web2c/pdf*tex.log,
> the German hyphenation is loaded into pdftex.fmt, but not
> into pdfetex.efmt.
[...]
> Which I consider a bug.  The documentation says that one
> should be able to use pdfetex pretty much as a drop-in
> replacement of pdftex.  So the prepackaged versions should
> be configured similarily.

You can edit /usr/share/texmf/etex/plain/config/language.def
and uncomment the German language.

Anyway you are right, and lot of config files are not under /etc/texmf:
    find  /usr/share/texmf -type d -name config -ls
prints a list of candidates for symlinks under /etc/texmf.

IMHO it is simpler to mimic the TDS under /etc/texmf, say
  /etc/texmf/
      web2c/
      tex/
          latex/ generic/ plain/ amstex/ context/ cyrplain/ mex/ platex/
      etex/
          latex/ plain/
      context/
      metafont/
      ...

The config/ subdir is removed from all these directories which contain
only configuration files, and config subdirs under /usr/share/texmf are
soft links to this new directories.
An exception is web2c, under which texmf.cnf and fmtutil.cnf are put.

Denis