[tex-live] Issues with texlive locating necessary files

Mojca Miklavec mojca.miklavec.lists at gmail.com
Sat Mar 14 08:40:37 CET 2015


On Sat, Mar 14, 2015 at 4:47 AM, Mirko Vogt wrote:
> 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.

No. Like Norbert said, "make install" doesn't install everything you
need. It installs just the binaries (and maybe a few other
minor/trivial things).

> If not, I'm not sure what two trees you're referring to.

svn://tug.org/texlive/trunk/Master/texmf-dist/
(http://tug.org/svn/texlive/trunk/Master/texmf-dist/)

That would be /usr/share/texmf-dist in your case according to what you
mention later in the message, but the main question is whether you
have enough files there in the first place. That folder should contain
a substantial amount of what's in the above mentioned SVN tree. What's
the size of contents in /usr/share/texmf-dist? If that's anything less
than hundreds of megabytes (up to a few gigabytes), chances are that
you will have problems running TeX.

The second very important thing is that you (or a script) should run
"[sudo] mktexlsr" from /usr/share/texmf-dir and you should have a file
with a name "ls-R" in that tree.

>> 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 that case $PREFIX/bin can be used *instead of*
texmf-dist/../bin/ARCH. But you still need "texmf-dist" (for example
fetched from SVN) somewhere. The tree could theoretically have another
name, but you need the contents and the ls-R file (that file is
generated by mktexlsr).

> Following up on that: Where does the "texmf-dist" come from?

Contents can be taken from SVN and have to be provided separately in
some way. "make install" won't fill it in for you.

>> 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.

Again, texmf-dist has to be some subset of
http://tug.org/svn/texlive/trunk/Master/texmf-dist/ and it's not an
easy task to figure out what subset you want.

If you want to create packages for your OS, there will be a
substantial effort needed to get it right (just as a warning). The
easiest thing you can do is to simply fetch the complete tree (just to
check whether it works).

I don't know how Debian works (it has a very well organized TeX
installation). You can also check (way less sophisticated, but still
very complex) MacPorts packages in
http://trac.macports.org/browser/trunk/dports/tex/ (see just
"texlive-*"). The contents of SVN are packaged in standalone archives,
for example http://distfiles.macports.org/texlive-latex-recommended/.
These files are then decompressed into $prefix/share/texmf-texlive.
Depending on the type/completeness of installation one can end up with
a few gigabytes. (I would nevertheless recommend looking into Debian
packages if you really want to create a package yourself.)

Mojca


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