On generating the format with "luatools --ini --compile --verbose cont-en" I got this error:

! TeX capacity exceeded, sorry [pool size=93529].

It seems that the setting of TEXMFCNF given in mag12 (/tex/texmf-local/web2c) was insufficient for getting the setup parameters for TeX format generation.

For my texlive setup I translated the mag12 entry into:

TEXMFCNF="{/usr/local/texlive/texmf-local/web2c,/usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf/web2c}"

But at least I needed:

TEXMFCNF="{/usr/local/texlive/texmf-local/web2c,/usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf/web2c}"

I hope others may profit from this observation.

By the way, the following seems very strange as luatools tells me:

LuaTools | loading /usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf

LuaTools | skipping /usr/local/texlive/texmf-local/web2c/texmf.cnf

The name of the file in the context distribution however is "/usr/local/texlive/texmf-local/web2c/context.cnf" but it is not searched for!

COULD THIS BE A MISNOMER, either in a script or in the file name?