config files in xelatex (was: Installing xetex from SVN alongside texlive_2007-14)

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

"R (Chandra) Chandrasekhar" <chandra@ee.uwa.edu.au> wrote:

> Norbert Preining wrote:
>
>> If you only need a new xetex binary, just compile one and put it into
>> /usr/bin/xetex (keeping a backup of the old one).

Shouldn't the new binary rather be put into /usr/local/bin/? 

> But what do I do with the .cfg files in TRUNK/texmf/tex/xelatex? Some
> config files like geometry.cfg have been modified as recently as March
> 2008. Where do I put these config files? Can they be drop-in
> replacements as well?

I'm not sure whether they can be drop-in replacements, but generally the
correct place is TEXMFLOCAL if the original is in TEXMFDIST (or
TEXMFMAIN), or TEXMFCONFIG if the original is already there.

Speaking of TEXMFCONFIG, the fact that geometry.cfg is not there means
that it was once decided that geometry.cfg is not meant for site-wide
configuration, but either not for configuration at all, or for a
per-document configuration. Looking at the file, I doubt that this was
correct. We actually have two versions, one is just comments except
\endinput and sits in texlive-latex-base-doc. The second one is the
xelatex-specific version which actually does something, *but* it does
not do the same as the comments in the other file suggest.

The LaTeX one has:

%% Uncomment and edit the line below to set default options.
%%\ExecuteOptions{a4paper,dvips}

Which looks like it should be in /etc/texmf/, and finally handled by our
once planned libpaper code. 

The XeLaTeX one reads

\@ifundefined{XeTeXversion}{}{
	%% Use the "pdftex" driver (i.e., \pdfpagewidth, \pdfpageheight) with XeTeX
	\Gm@setdriver{pdftex}
	
	%% don't check this AtBeginDocument, just believe me!
	\let\Gm@checkdrivers\relax
}

This piece of code is not really configuration, it's rather a question
of "installing" xelatex properly for geometry.sty.

Reading the geometry documentation, it seems to me that what xelatex
does is formally a misuse of the file, but it has no other choice
(except waiting for geometry.sty to get updated for xelatex, which won't
work). 

I think the mid-term solution would be to discuss this with the TeXLive
team, and then decide on a recommmendation that every package which
contains driver-specific code should allow loading of an additional
file, ${packagename}.drv. This would make it possible to just put such a
file in the path where it is found only by the specific engine, and be
done. 

For the time being, it seems to me that it would be best to move
geometry.cfg to TEXMFCONFIG - but that seems right, anyway.

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)