bb wrote:
It would be a very good thing if stock texlive could reside in texmf and texmf-dist while your complex setup and bleeding edge stuff could reside in texmf-var, texmf-local, texmf-fonts, texmf-extras, etc. I can guess at several reasons why this might not be feasible. But it would be a worthy goal for both texlive and context to make such interoperability and upgradability trivial. The current confusion over engine support, for example, is simply maddening.
Texlive is the closest thing that exists to a standard TeX "platform". One of its virtues, in my opinion, is its inflexibility. It is fairly stable over time and does not vary significantly across distributions like tetex does.
Have you complained to the TeXlive maintainers as well?Haven't I made enough enemies already :-)
not yet -)
TeX Live is both a binary distribution and a collection of resources.
Normally context -as shipped with tex live- works ok, apart from changes in non context specific parts that went unnoticed (chnages in font names, changes in patterns, and such) which may lead to broken functionality.
Sebastian always tries to get the latest greatest context in there and tests it as well, so the problem is not in tex live as it is.
The binaries are a different story. There is a close relationship between binaries like pdftex, mpost on the one hand and kpse and texmf.cnf on the other hand; and then there are of course the scripts that call these programs.
It has always been kind of a struggle to make the scripts work for all platforms. The main reason for this is that the user interface of kpse is unix based and assumes a certain shell. Also, some associated scripts (fmtutil, updmap) are shell scripts. One can safely say that therefore tex live is mostly a unix distribution. History has learned that it's kind of tricky to keep the windows and unix versions in sync (if only because there are two source trees);
last year there has been several incompatible changes in tds and the binaries; to mention a few:
- the multiple suffixes (efmt,ofmt,fmt,xfmt,..) were replaced by one (fmt) under the assumption that the engine subpath would be used to distinguish between aleph, pdfetex, xetex, etc.; unfortunately in practice this is not supported due to the fact that it's too complex to incorporate in the form generating scripts;
---> this is why in texexec i need to deal with it myself and also need to catch old cases etc; shell escaping is thereby rather painful.
- font paths (enc/map) has changed in an downwards incompatible way ---> this can be repaired by the textools script
- as usual there were changes in patterns that went unnoticed ---> this is why i will start shipping context with its own pattern files
- the script paths has changed as well as the way to locate scripts in the tree; which is quite painful fro those who run tex in integrated environments --> this is solved by using texmfstart as stub [that way i can try to remain downward compatible]
keep in mind that some context users use aleph/pdfetex/xetex alongside and that many context users use fonts not present in the standard tree; so, we need to deal with that ourselves
now, on my main machine i use windows and on the webservers linux; i never had problems in getting things running on windows, but unxi has always been troublesome, esp in updating systems that had already some kind of tex installed; this is why i always use the minimal distributions on unix: setuptex.sh nicely isolated the tree from whatever present; it is a known fact that, although tex live is rathere closely related to tetex, one should not install both alongside: different selection, different installation etc; macosx is yet another story but as far as i can see, gerben does a good job in providing update paths (no surprose since tex on the mac is moving faster than the rest)
it may be good to know that the last user group dvd actually shipped with protext based on miktex; miktex also has an update policy; it would be interesting to see what happens with the miktex for unix announcement.
currently fptex (or its more extensive version xemtex) is maintained independently from the rest of tex live, thereby maing tex live more and more unix adventure (apart from the resources tree)
another source of confusion is the fact that each distribution ships with different trees (texmf, texmf-local, texmf.local, texmfte, texmfgw, texmf-dist, texmf-doc, etc); here i always merge the common part into texmf, and put context updates in texmf-local
if you want the best tree: take the texmf tree from the user group dvd; this is a merge of the tex live trees, a bunch of ctan goodies, extra fonts etc; personally i tend to consider manfred's tree as the default one
so ... it's a complex live out there
and .. don't blame the maintainers too much .. it's not trivial to keep track of all changes in operating systems, compilers, libraries, macro packages etc ... it's only unfortunate that the common binary base is developed in a bit too platform bound way [but i try to hide as much as possible by using texexec cum suis]
Hans
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