On 5/9/05, Taco Hoekwater
bb wrote:
I think it would be a very useful exercise for hh to install a complete texlive on a stock fedora box.
I'm sure he would be happy to, if you provided the box and some funding (!).
Reading my own words I see how they don't exactly convey warm appreciation for all the hard work that has been put into context. Allow me to retract them and offer instead to help, as time, money, and resources permit :-)
Then write down _every_ step necessary to get beta cont-tmf.zip installed and working.
I guess I could conceivably try to do this, as long as I only have to do it once, but I will not be able to provide support for it afterwards.
I can understand your reluctance, especially since texlive has installation and maintenance issues of its own, as you allude to below. Since texlive 2005 is in the process of being worked out, perhaps a better use of time would be to ensure that a fully functional, up-to-date (and upgradable!) context gets included.
I have a fairly complex TeX setup, and for that reason I do not use texlive. I can try to write down this howto for *current* context beta and *current* pdfetex, but afterwards I have to revert my system back to 'normal operation' immediately, so there is no way for me to keep on helping people after the initial installation.
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.
Assuming someone volunteers to pick up supporting context-on-texlive afterwards, then I am willing to write down the initial page. But I do not want to waste a day fighting TeXlive for no good, so unless I hear from someone, I will do nothing.
I am hesitant to accept your offer because I am afraid that my problems will be exposed as pathetically easy to fix. Before you go to the trouble, I will take some time to debug texexec.pl, which is where I think the final problem is. If I succeed, I will post the recipe on contextgarden.
I would think that targeting texlive as the standard platform for distributing context on linux/unix would make the most sense. It should _not_ be necessary to make anything but a trivial change to texmf.cnf.
Have you complained to the TeXlive maintainers as well?
Haven't I made enough enemies already :-)