Bugzilla Bug 135548

I have a file jk.latex which has the form

    \documentclass[12pt]{article}
    \usepackage{fancybox,comment}
     ... [[Many packages loaded]]
    \begin{document}
    \end{document}\endinput

which I have used for many years to make a format file via cmd

    %  initex \&latex mylatex.ltx  jk.latex

This produced a format file mylatex.fmt.  To quickly tex-up
my math paper math.latex I would run

    %  virtex \&mylatex  math.latex

However, after some emerge in 2005, both of these cmds
stopped working, producing instead this error message:

    This is TeX, Version 3.141592 (Web2C 7.5.5) (INITEX)
    ---! /var/lib/texmf/web2c/latex.fmt was written by pdfetex
    (Fatal format file error; I'm stymied)

A few weeks ago, with a fresh install of Gentoo (2006.0) and
TeTeX, I verified that the problem still exists.

To me this looks like a bug in either TeTeX or in how Gentoo
links the file.  Or else the syntax of initex has changed.
However, I have searched the web and found many variants of
the initex cmd; for me, they all produce the same error.

[Aside: At school we have an old installation of TeX on
Solaris boxes.  There, the cmd

    initex \&latex mylatex.ltx  jk.latex

still works.]

===================================

Can you please try the following variant:
latex -ini \&latex mylatex.ltx jk.latex
(and the equivalent for virtex: latex -ini \&mylatex whatever.latex)
The initex and virtex symlinks were originally removed from the tetex source
(at some point the past) because:
- They were no longer need since it is equivalent to the *tex -ini cmd line.
- and to quote Thomas Esser:
"To get the format right regarding search paths and array sizes, the
right --progname has to be used. And, even more, the format must be
build with the same engine that runs it (example: a "tex" based initex
will generate an unusable "latex" format, since latex is run with the
pdfetex engine). So by removing "initex", we have removed a common source
of problems."

In Gentoo someone decided to artificial keep virtex and initex symlinked to tex
and hence they do not work with latex formats.
I'm going to remove the symlinks from the ebuild if you provide positive
feedback about using the cmd lines above (I didn't create the symlinks in the
first place :-)

No response for more than a week.
I have removed the *virtex symlinks, so there should be no confusion anymore.

I sincerely apologize for my tardy response.  The cmd-lines that
you sent indeed work for me in Gentoo, and I agree about removing
the initex and virtex symlinks.

I have tested the pdf analogs of your cmd-lines, and they
work; e.g 

 latex -ini -jobname=jk-pdflatex \&pdflatex mylatex.ltx jk-pkgs.latex

works.  One thing that confused me for a bit is that, it
seems, now "-jobname" is used to name the to-be-created
format-file, whereas "-fmt" used to (apparently) serve this function.

====

ASIDE: I also tested your two cmd-lines and their pdf variants on
the old TeTeX implementation at my school

    % latex --version
    TeX (Web2C 7.3.1) 3.14159
    kpathsea version 3.3.1

and one of the pdf variants does not work (causes a
segmentation fault) but the other three cmd-lines do.

Again, I apologize for my late reply, and I thank you for
YOUR quick solution.