Debian Bug#338046: whizzytex: einitex unavailable from tetex and no longer functions.

[Junichi Uekawa <dancer@netfort.gr.jp>]

retitle 338046 whizzytex: einitex unavailable from tetex and no longer functions.
thanks


Hi,

There is a change in tetex-3.0 Debian package which 
removes 'initex' 'einitex' commands, and requires 'tex -ini' 
instead.

According to the maintainers, this is an upstream change, 
and other distributions will possibly follow.


[About removing 'initex' symlink from package]

> 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.)

The changelog/news files don't mention this change, and 
manpages still mention 'initex' etc., so this sounds like 
a premature change to make.

Can you point out which mail address I should direct the 
question to.


> >> 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.

Thanks for your tips, however tetex-bin 2.0.2-31 supposedly used 
efmt files; but it doesn't seem to return expected values:

$ basename `kpsewhich --format fmt tex` 
tex.fmt
$ basename `kpsewhich --format fmt latex`
latex.fmt


Ermm.. something is confused, I suppose.


regards,
	junichi