Re: Saving space...

Hi David,

[please excuse my silence in the last few weeks; I was quite busy but
 I hope to be able to process the whole backlog of my mails quite
 soon now]

> generating executables of their own choice.  So what keeps us from
> scrapping every executable and corresponding pool files and stuff
> except PDFeTeX (apart from Omega...)?  Correct me if I am mistaken,

Well, the actual binaries just make up a small portion of the whole
system. There is much more that most of the users do not need
(e.g. dvitype).

Maybe, some more enable / disable options for web2c would be needed to
get more control about these things.

As for the TeX engine question, I think it is already very easy to
replace tex and etex by pdfetex. Just
  fmtutil --edit   # make the change
  texlinks
  fmtutil --all

If you change texk/web2c/fmtuil.in before building (i.e. patch the
sources before building), you'll get this right from the beginning.
This problem should be easy to automate via configure flags, too.
Someone just needs to do it.

I am quite short of time at the moment and there are so many things in
my queue (after getting some ideas during the last DANTE conference).

As for the database suggestion (made later in this thread), I think that
it could not replace the filesystem organization, only extend it. Too
many things depend on that filesystem based organization.

Thomas