Bug#390129: Rebuilding only provided formats - will that work?

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Frank Küster <frank@debian.org> wrote:

> Hi Ralf, hi Norbert,

Still no answer...

>> 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?

I think I'll use the --cnffile switch for tetex-base and tetex-extra.

Regards, Frank

-- 
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)