On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 16:54, Jörg Hagmann wrote:
Mojca has sorted out my problems with minimal installations. Since our correspondence was private, I would like to share the conclusions:
I had old and new installations and "source /path/oldtex/tex/setuptex /path/oldtex/tex" in the bash startup file (.profile or .bashrc). When I switched to the new installation, I changed TEXROOT (by source /path/newtex ...). This seems to generate a mixture of TEX... variables, including some pointing to the "oldtex" installation.
Everything works fine if TEXROOT is set in a virgin shell that hasn't seen a "source ..." command yet.
According to Mojca, it's a bit more complicated. I copy her answer to my question, whether the above is correct:
Not completely. Copy and rename the old setuptex to the new distribution or the new setuptex to the old distribution (you need to rename it in order to prevent rewriting the file next time when you use it) or use something like source /Applications/newtex/tex/setuptex ~/context/tex and it should work.
The reason for this weird behavior is that we removed almost all the variables from setuptex back in May 2009. This is just the contrary of what Hans tried to achieve several years ago to overwrite the tetex's pollution with variables. Now that hardly anyone uses tetex ... we didn't bother about that any more, but it is still a problem if one sets up an old distribution in .bashrc and then tries to use a new one. (In that case the old ConTeXt behaves just as impolitely as tetex and hinders the ability to use the latest one.) Mojca