Re: Bug#338046: whizzytex: FTBFS: einitex not provided anymore by tetex-bin (or elsewhere in sid)
Junichi Uekawa <dancer@netfort.gr.jp> wrote:
> Hi,
>
>> > whizzytex users reported that tetex no longer etex.
>> > I've not quite investigated the problem; but I would like
>> > to check the intention.
>> >
>> > Is the intention to remove 'etex' 'einitex' commands?
>> >
>> > From the 'NEWS' file, it looks like 'pdfetex' is the default now,
>> > so invoking pdfeinitex would be the right option?
>>
>> Atsuhito has already answered the main points. I've just had a look at
>> the whizzytex sources, and I found some other possible problems.
>
> First:
> initex is a well-documented interface to running tex
> for dumping formats.
> (e.g. 'TeX by Topic'). Please do not deprecate such interface.
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.)
>> 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.
Regards, Frank
--
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer
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