[tex-live] TeX Live 2010 : odd behaviour after moving to spare system on removable disc

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2011-11-07 at 10:56:02 +0000, Philip TAYLOR wrote:

 > Following a catastrophic system failure yesterday, I removed
 > my portable drive from the dead system and installed it in
 > my spare system, at which point its drive letter changed from
 > E: to I:.  I adjusted the path on the spare system to remove
 > the reference to TeX Live 2008 and to include a reference to
 > I:\TeX\Live\2010\bin\win32.  I then ran TeXworks and compiled
 > a previously working document, but two strange things happened :
 > the log became extraordinarily prolix, and it failed to find
 > my local copy of "Cropmarks.tex", in
 > I:\TeX\Live\Common\TeXMF\Local\tex\plain\local 
 > 
 > The prolicity disappeared on a second run (I believe that
 > it was building one or more format files on the first run,
 > presumably mistakenly believing that this was necessary)
 > but it still cannot find "Cropmarks.tex", nor can I find
 > an option in TLMGR to tell it where local TeX files are
 > stored.

I suppose that you've set TEXMFLOCAL in I:\TeX\Live\2010\texmf.cnf .
This is the proper place for such customizations.  If not, look at
I:\TeX\Live\2010\texmf\web2c\texmf.cnf .  The latter shouldn't be
changed but since there are no updates for TL-2010 it doesn't matter.

However, I strongly recommend to avoid absolute paths in your
configuration.  TeX Live sets TEXMFLOCAL relative to the binaries,
i.e. $SELFAUTOPARENT/../texmf-local, which is I:\TeX\Live\texmf-local
on your system.  Maybe something like

  TEXMFLOCAL=$SELFAUTOPARENT/../common/texmf/local

in I:\TeX\Live\2010\texmf.cnf will do, you can check with

  kpsewhich --var-value=TEXMFLOCAL

 > There are no environment variables starting "TeX...".

Good!  They usually cause more problems than they solve.  Well, the
question is: Did you set TEXMFLOCAL as an environment variable on your
*old* system?

Regards,
  Reinhard

-- 
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Reinhard Kotucha                                      Phone: +49-511-3373112
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