strange reproduction of gamelan.mem file with TexLive 2011

[Juergen Reuter]

Do not know exactly whether this is specific to TeXLive 2011 or MAC OS X. Could someone check?

[Juergen Reuter]

It is not a reproduction, the file is not produced at all. It seems that in TeXLive 2011 the MetaPost? version (1.504) does no longer come with the inimp variant, although the help still displays it, compare:

mpost --ini
This is MetaPost, version 1.211 (TeX Live 2010) (kpathsea version 6.0.0) (INIMP)

with

/usr/local/texlive/2011/bin/i386-linux/mpost --ini
This is MetaPost, version 1.504 (kpathsea version 6.0.1)

As you can see I tested this on Linux, so this is no MAC OS X but a LaTeX problem with the most recent TexLive?.

[Juergen Reuter]

There we go: ​http://www.tug.org/texlive/doc/texlive-en/texlive-en.html#news Here we find:

9.2 Present

2011 saw relatively few changes. 

...

The MetaPost (mpost) program no longer creates or uses .mem files. The needed files, such as plain.mp, are simply read on every run. This is related to supporting MetaPost as a library, which is another significant though not user-visible change. 

If there is no objection (since we do not need the .mem file anyhow) I would remove it from the Makefiles.

[Juergen Reuter]

Oops, that breaks make install. That is a blocker.

[kilian]

It's not a good sign that the MP developers broke this, the .mem feature is actually the way it was intended to work. Maybe they thought nobody was actually using it?

Since you saw the developers' logs: any chance that they might support floating point ...?

Nevertheless, the main reason for using .mem, namely to speed up the loading, has disappeared in the last decade (10 years ago, it was essential). So, feel free to remove it. Instead of the .mem file, all of the Gamelan source files have to be in a place where Metapost can find them, in all stages (check, distcheck, production). I still think that the .mem solution was more convenient.

[Juergen Reuter]

Yes, I know. We already removed the usage of the .mem file it was for some time buggy (I think in the MetaPost? version 1.20x in TexLive? 2010). Done in r3647.