[tex-live] mptopdf problem: texmf.cnf not found.

[George N. White III]

On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 7:06 AM, Byung-Jae Kwak <byung.kwak at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 7:55 AM, George N. White III <gnwiii at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 7:08 PM, Reinhard Kotucha
>> <reinhard.kotucha at web.de> wrote:
>>> On 30 August 2010 George N. White III wrote:
>>>
>>>  > > It appears that somehow, MSYS interferes with my TeX Live install, and
>>>  > > the search
>>>  > > path is prefixed with "/msys/1.0".
>>>  > > Please help!
>>>  >
>>>  > When you move from an Msys process to a windows process, Msys tries
>>>  > to adjust environment vars that look like paths from "Msys" to
>>>  > "Windows" locations.  This certainly seems to be what you are
>>>  > seeing.
>>>
>>> I didn't encounter something like this on the MSYS version I installed
>>> two or three years ago.  I ran TeX and Perl in an MSYS environment.
>>> TeX Live doesn't set environment variables, so nothing unexpected
>>> should happen.  But ActivePerl sets PERL5LIB and it worked without any
>>> problems too.  Seems that you have a newer version of MSYS.  I don't
>>> have access to the Windows machine anymore.  If newer versions of MSYS
>>> really behave as you describe, I suspect they are buggy.
>>
>> See the entry "A tail about the Windows Unix shells and MSYS path mangling"
>> <http://curiousprogrammer.wordpress.com/2010/03/13/enablers-and-obstructors>
>> for some examples.
>
> I am not versed in UNIX enough to understand the blog entry.

The UNIX part is that $PATH lacks drive letters and uses forward slashes.
MSYS works with "/bin" which Windows knows as "C:\msys-NN\bin".

Please post your results for the two perl examples from the blog.  There is a
basic perl provided by TL2010, but it may be that some other perl is being
used.

> But, even assuming MSYS has a problem, I still don't understand why
> this is hapenning. mptopdf is not an MSYS application. If I did not have
> MSYS installed, I would not be having this problem. Am I wrong?

It isn't that MSYS has a problem, it is that normal MSYS "features"
are mistakenly being applied to the variables used internally to
pass TeX Live's directory structure between TeX Live programs.

Your symptoms certainly appear to be caused by MSYS path
munging.   Now that I can run linux in a VM I have stopped using
MSYS and Windows TL, so it is up to you to figure out how MSYS
is getting involved here.   The top suspects are a command shell
(sh.exe or bash.exe) and perl.   I don't know if TeX Live on Windows
uses any MSYS .dll's, but I think MSYS provides some mechanism
to control the PATH munging, so another possibility is that your
environment somehow conflicts with the settings needed by TeX Live.

Happy bug hunting.


-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia