From: Taco Hoekwater
Should I add these steps to the Wiki in the Debian installation page?
Yes, please. But everything except the 'fmt.d' step sounds applicable to other teTeX installations, so maybe you should create a completely new 'teTeX update' page.
I agree, but the perfect is the enemy of the good so I just put the
instructions on the Debian page for review (hopefully it's all okay).
Pieces can be transplanted to the generic tetex page as people check
them and find them okay.
From: Hans Hagen
that method rather than the raw tetex method. For one, xpdf has recurring buffer overruns being discovered, and tetex (at least on
afaik this does not affect pdftex, since it uses only a small part of the xpdf library
You're right. But tetex-3.0 gets updated quite often for various reasons (15 updates in the last 12 months, from 3.0-1 to 3.0-15), and I wanted to make a setup that doesn't involve any extra steps when that happens (except for the one I cannot avoid now, reupdating metapost to 0.901 -- but I sent Taco a Makefile to automate most of that).
* deleted the ~/.texmf-var/web2c/{cont-en,mptopdf}.fmt (I didn't have any metafun formats or I would delete them too).
hm, i could let texexec do that
That would be good. Then I could delete that info from the Wiki page.
* did "(cd ; kpsewhich --format=fmt cont-en )" to find any other instances of cont-en.fmt, and then remove it: rm /var/lib/texmf/web2c/cont-en.fmt Same for mptopdf and (if any) metafun.
if you use newtexexe it will report more details about what it finds (it is also more clever in making formats)
I'll have to try it -- although first I want to understand all the corner cases with texexec. Context folks develop software faster than I can even read about it! By the way, where is newtexexec? I see the newtexexec.rb in the .zip file, and could presumably run it with ruby, but where is it supposed to end up?
* As root, ran update-texmf to regenerate /etc/texmf/texmf.cnf
ah ... i hate that kind of duplications ... a source of hard to trace problems; the teds (tex directory structure) is around for a while and rather stable so i wonder why such config files have to en dup in etc; just don't call it a config file; also, the kpse texmf.cnf model provides for multiple cnf files
They preserve the TDS with a symlink: /usr/share/texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf points to the /etc/texmf/texmf.cnf file.
i remember from long ago that there's also some path trickery involved (btw, i'm not sure where the binaries live)
Hmm, tell me more about that if you remember. -Sanjoy