[tex-live] Issues with texlive locating necessary files

Mirko Vogt tex at nanl.de
Sat Mar 14 04:47:36 CET 2015


Hello Norbert,

On 03/14/2015 03:08 AM, Norbert Preining wrote:
> On Sat, 14 Mar 2015, Mirko Vogt wrote:
>>    /usr/bin/mktexfmt: line 1027: //texmf-dist/texconfig/tcfmgr: not found
>
> Do you have a proper texmf-dist tree installed?
>
> Building and installing the sources *does*NOT* suffice to get a
> running system. You need to have texmf-dist from SVN.

I'm not sure about that - what I checked out is

   svn://username:password@tug.org/texlive/trunk/Build/source

and a <make install> seems to install everything I need.
If not, I'm not sure what two trees you're referring to.

> THen you have to put the binaries into
> 	texmf-dist/../bin/ARCH/
> (depending on your compile option without the ARCH).

Nothing bin-like under texmf-dist/, but a regular <make install> puts
quite some binaries into $PREFIX/bin (mktex*, pdftex, etc.) where
prefix in my case is "/usr".

Is texmf-dist/../bin/ARCH/ what I'm missing from the texmf-dist thingy?

>
> In principle any tex program that uses kpathsea searches first for
> the main texmf.cnf via a compiled in list of dirs, that also
> includes some relative to the location of the binary.
>
> Use kpsewhich -show-path texmf.cnf to see where the files are searched.
>
> If you want to search different ones, you need to set that before
> compiling.

The texmf.cnf doesn't seem to be the problem (in case I got you and the errors right) -
AFAIK it wasn't "not found" at any time.
< kpsewhich -show-path texmf.cnf > includes the path where it actually is:
/usr/share/texmf-dist/web2c

What's missing according the error messages is "fmtutil.cnf" (besides "pdftex.fmt").

>
>> Question 1) Is setting $TEXMFMAIN as an environment variable the proper
>> way? How do other distributions achieve the prefix-path being set correctly?
>
> Installing a proper texmf-dist tree and setting the proper search path
> before compiling, if necessary.

Following up on that: Where does the "texmf-dist" come from?
And - as mentioned above - to me it doesn't seem the search path is wrong.

>
>> Question 2) What is necessary to make the map file being found by tcfmgr?
>
> a proper kpathsea setup, that is, the main texmf.cnf needs to be found.

As stated above, search path seems right and texmf.cnf is located under an
included path.

>
>
> I suggest *looking* into the packaging of TeX Live for Debian/Fedora/Suse
> etc to see how it is done there.

Unfortunately I can't really match the debian *.orig.-src-archives to the
source found in SVN.
Still not sure, where the stated texmf-dist (or any other required) tree
comes from, if not from above mentioned SVN repository.

Thanks a lot

> Norbert

   mirko


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