[XeTeX] XeTeX compile error in Gentoo Linux

[Ralf Stubner]

"$(C?@@N<v(B" <erdos.cs at gmail.com> writes:

> With your patch, I could successfully rebuild xetex system in my Gentoo box.
> However, when I executed 'xetex -ini  -jobname=xelatex -progname=xelatex *
> xelatex.ini'
> in build time, I had same error about hungarian hyphenation patterns and
> Serbian Cyrillic Hyphenation Patterns. Odd things is that by using texconf
> program,
> I already have commented out these language(see below) .
> After installation, when I executed 'xetex -ini  -jobname=xelatex
> -progname=xelatex *xelatex.ini' again
> no errors are occurred.

This sounds odd. The only explanation I can guess is a typical error
with using teTeX 3.0. When calling texconfig instead of texconfig-sys.AN9
you are making changes in your private TEXMF trees. Most likely you now
have several versions of language.dat. What is the output of

 kpsewhere language.dat

? Especially if there is a version in $HOME/.texmf-var or
$HOME/.texmf-config I expect that only this version has been modified.
However, this file is not used when you build the format as a different
user.

It get's really bad when you call texconfig as root, since the new files
in /root/.texmf-{var,config} are inaccessible for anybody else. :-(

Bottom line: Use the *-sys variants for making changes to the system as
a whole. 

BTW, I would always add appropriate format instructions to fmtutil.cnf
and use fmtutil-sys to create the formats. Since Gentoo uses a method 
similar to Debian for updating updmap.cfg and texmf.cnf, it might be
that they do this for language.dat and fmtutil.cnf, too. Not having
access to a Gentoo box I can't check this, though.

cheerio
ralf

1 The same holds for fmtutil/fmtutil-sys and updmap/updmap-sys.