running as apache user does not work, why?

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2019-08-16 at 21:42:30 +0100, David Carlisle wrote:

 > On Fri, 16 Aug 2019 at 21:03, mario chiari <ml at mariochiari.net> wrote:
 
 >> it puzzles me why I do not need anything special to compile
 >>     when I call the 2016 texlive

 > You were calling pdftex by full path so most of the time it will
 > work even if you are using an account which does not have the
 > texlive 2019 bin in its path, but the log you showed initially
 > showed that on that document a missing font caused it to run
 > mktextfm to try to generate the font with metafont, so at that
 > point it picks up the wrong script as the path is wrong and thing
 > go bad.  Presumably by now your texlive 2016 setup has most fonts
 > generated that are needed and so you get lucky more often.

Indeed.  If the TeX Live bin/ directory isn't in PATH and the program
is called by full path everything works fine unless the program calls
other programs which reside in the texlive/bin/<platform>/ directory.

Everything works as expected if TeX Live is installed properly and
users follow the instructions provided by the installer (setting PATH,
MANPATH, INFOPATH).

If it's necessary to call a TeX program as a user who has not TeX Live
in PATH, the invocation on Unix could be

  PATH=/path/to/texlive/bin pdftex myfile.tex

The question is whether this should be documented somewhere.  I
personally don't see any reason because TeX Live works fine if users
follow the instructions.  The problem Mario encountered is not TeX
Live related, any other program called with full path will fail if it
tries to call a program which is supposed to be in PATH but actually
isn't.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha                            Phone: +49-511-3373112
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