[tex-live] Fwd: files generated by fmtutil/updmap -- platform independent?

[Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard]

Le 22/08/2010 13:12, Marc Espie a écrit :
> On Sun, Aug 22, 2010 at 06:19:04PM +0900, Norbert Preining wrote:
>> The slight problem is the "just merge" you mentioned ...
> 
> How hard can it be ? are the formats *that* complicated ? in most cases,
> it's just a question of parsing a few lines of text and merging them.
> ~20 lines of perl or so.
> 
I'm not sure about map files, so I won't discuss them. Concerning ls-R files, at
first glance, it seems doable to update them without re-scanning the whole tree,
which is indeed quite expensive due to disk access. Actually, one could even
imagine generating the ls-R files for TEXMFMAIN and TEXMFDIST from texlive.tlpdb.

The main problem could be people changing files here and manually running
mktexlsr afterwards. We can't always assume people do things the right way.

I'm not saying it's worth it, I have no definite opinion on that right now, but
it seems technically doable.

By the way, the formats (fmt files) definitely need to be regenerated (I'm
probably stating the obvious, but anyway).

> If it's currently difficult to do, maybe tweaking the file formats to make
> things simpler is the best idea ?
> 
Well, simplifying the way map entries are handled would definitely be great, but
that would be an ambitious project. (Which doesn't mean it shouldn't be done,
but it would definitely require consequent work and careful thought.)

Manuel.