[NTG-context] Context using LuaTeX - distribution packaging question

[Hans Hagen]

Tobias Burnus wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> for openSUSE there are now beta TeX Live 2008 packages available
> (http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Publishing/). [By Werner
> Fink, who does also the normal openSUSE packages.]
> 
> The question is how the ConTeXt with LuaTeX should be best handled. By
> default, there is no luatex-cache and no (luatex) format.
> 
> Of cause a user can do:
> 
>   export TEXMFCNF=/usr/share/texmf/web2c
>   # export TEXMFCACHE=somewhere
>   luatools --generate --verbose
>   luatools --ini --compile cont-en
> 
> but in principle I would expect that the distribution does this already,
> which saves the TEXMFCACHE per user and makes "texexec --lua" working
> without requiring to run first all the other commands.
> 
> 
> Questions:
> 
> a) Is the TEXMFCNF environment variable necessary or can this also be
> read by a config file, which is overwritten by the environment variable?
> Which scripts/executables make use of that environemt variable?

there is this automess stuff implemented which assumes that the 
distribution kind of follows the de-facto standards of having teh bin 
relative to the tree; in al other cases one needs to set env vars

btw, there is a file texmfcnf.lua alongside the cnf file whioch can be 
tweaked; so you can leave the original cnf untouched

> b) Is is possible -- as with kpsewhich -- to have a global cache for the
> format + global directories - and local directories which have then a
> higher precedence? I mean like: A global directory cache incl. the
> format files plus if the user creates a $HOME/texmf tree a user
> $TEXMFCACHE which contains the hashes of the user directory but such
> that luatex still finds the formats in the global directory?

not yet .. i'm still pondering over a robust system (one side effect is 
for instance that when there are multiple cached copies we need to get 
not only the one first in the chain, but also a valid one; i.e. what to 
do if the latest one has an older version number than demanded and such; 
no big deal, but it means that the cache loader needs to be made more 
clever which is something that i will not do in a current or beta but 
first on my own system when we have reached some stability)

Hans

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