Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: USE flag transition: tetex and latex

[Alexis Ballier]

Hi,

> >
> > I don't think documentation using texinfo.tex (the documentation
> > that comes in .texi files) uses latex --- I believe that
> > texinfo.tex uses just plain tex.

actually you got a point; but let me show how the boundary is small:

take a texi file, process it with tex -> it works.
remove the \input texinfo at the beginning -> fails

run: 
$ tex -ini   -jobname=texinfo -progname=texinfo texinfo.ini

that will give you: texinfo.fmt and texinfo.log in the current directory
run as root:
# ln -s tex /usr/bin/texinfo

then run texinfo on your .texi file where you have removed the \input
(and in the same directory where you had texinfo.fmt) -> it works
funny heh ?

what is a format ? it's just : run tex on a file, dump the memory
of the interpreter and write it to a file.

what is latex ? bah it's just more or less the same thing: some tex
macros and definitions, processed through a tex engine to get latex.fmt
If you check it, the latex executable is just a symlink to the tex
engine used by your distribution ;)


Seeing that, should we call it tex, texi or texinfo ? is latex really
latex or should we call it tex ?
I don't have any answer to that, and I think we should have useflag
names that refer to commonly used names for what they represent. If you
tell me that .texi files are commonly referenced as tex stuff, then why
not tex; but I'd call it texinfo.


> Do we even provide plain tex via an ebuild or useflag?

for the above reasons, we have tex ;)

Regards,


Alexis.