Are some of the people around who wrote this?
I wrote some of it (hangs head in shame) by typing in all the steps I had to use on my Debian stable/testing system to get a newer ConTeXt to work with tetex 3.0 as the basis. I agree, it is confusing and I hope it can be improved. In the previous discussion, the issue came up of whether ConTeXt should be installed per user or for the whole system. The Debian_installation instructions on the wiki are for a per-user install, because I couldn't figure out a robust way of having an easily updatable installation that goes in TEXMFLOCAL. A system-wide installation, if done cleanly, would be much easier (as plink pointed out). If you (or 'texexec --make' to generate the formats) ask kpathsea where to put the format files, it'll give you a directory in TEXMFHOME, so a per user install. But how do you ask kpathsea the correct question so that it'll tell you where they should go for a system-wide install? -Sanjoy `Never underestimate the evil of which men of power are capable.' --Bertrand Russell, _War Crimes in Vietnam_, chapter 1.