On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 12:20 AM, frantisek holop wrote:

hello gang,

after almost a year of traveling i am back. anybody missed me? :] thought so.

Hello Frantisek, Just a quick note ... not too many people on the list might be able to follow since there are probably not too many tetex3 users around, and the page you refer to is old as earth, so keep using whatever fits you best. Did you want to suggest changes on the webpage or did you want to ask if some procedure works? (I fully understand why you want to keep using tetex.)

i have made the openbsd installation of context on top of texexec3 wiki page on the context wiki because i frequently reinstall my notebook and start from scratch with all my software. i realize by now texlive is the new thing but before i make context minimal work on openbsd i still prefer to bring up to date context on the much less bloated base of tetex3.

my biggest gripe at the moment always at the end the ruby scripts...

but this is something that could be easily changed. i personally find the following instructions the most helpful: http://wiki.contextgarden.net/TeTeX_3.0_installation#Ruby_scripts

at the moment, the directory /usr/local/share/texmf-local/scripts/context/stubs/unix/ contains a bunch of scripts that are nice but unusable because

1. they dont have the x bit set

2. most of them contain something like

texmfstart somescript "$@"

while texmfstart itself is not defined anywhere

That folder is not meant to be a replacement for binaries. It's just a folder where files can be taken from and put somewhere else afterwards. They don't have the x bit set because zip on windows doesn't handle permission bits. Concerning texmfstart: it's now part of texlive and it's part of minimals. You cannot expect recent binaries to be already part of an ancient tex distribution. Hans probably won't add texmfstart to that folder since distribution is supposed to take care of that. If you need a simple command to fetch all in one run, just do (single line in case it gets broken): rsync -av rsync://contextgarden.net/minimals/current/bin/context/linux/bin/ /usr/local/bin/

it would be really nice if these stubs could be just dropped as replacements for any current scripts and work out of the box.

Is there any other problem apart from the executable bit (that Hans is not able to fix comfortably)?

i am not sure my proposed solution is a good one, because frankly, except texexec i have never used any of the other scripts.. but looking at the afore-quoted wikipage it seems to me that the author favoured the approach of calling all the other sripts using texexec.

You mean texmfstart?

the beauty of this is that no other scripts need to be installed.

so what do you people think about the following approach:

stub for texmfstart to be put under /usr/local/bin/texmfstart: #!/bin/sh

ruby `kpsewhich --format=texmfscripts texmfstart.rb` "$@"

At the moment this file is a literal copy of texmfstart.rb. It's like a chicken-and-egg problem. Hans wants to get rid of kpathsea, but by copying the file one doesn't always get the latest texmfstart (one needs to make sure that it's always up-to-date). The "ruby `kpsewhich ..." approach is also OK.

stub for texexe to be put under /usr/local/bin/texexec: #!/bin/sh

SCRIPTNAME=`basename $0`

if [ X"$SCRIPTNAME" = X"texexec" ]; then exec texmfstart texexec.rb "$@" else exec texmfstart $SCRIPTNAME "$@" fi

and all the other script stubs could be removed i guess...

You don't need to copy other files/stubs if you don't need them, but some people depend on existence of some tools like ctxtools (which is easier to use than texmfstart ctxtools). If you don't need other scripts, just ignore them. (The scripts described on tetex installation page are probably not used my many people. But those pages need to be fixed and unified somehow.) Mojca