Comment 5 for bug 186164

On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 02:30:32PM -0000, Norbert Preining wrote:
> in ~/texmf.cnf?? If yes, it does matter. How do you expect that tex is
> finding that? Should it search the whole hard disk, or the whole $HOME
> (which might be on NFS and be huge ..).
> (...)
> Thanks, I was asking for the setting of TEXMFCNF, not its meaning.

Sorry. I was confused, lacking the full context of the original
bug report. I have learnt things later, but I did not see how to
add comments to the bug.

Anyway, this is what I have
  TEXMFCNF=.:/home/georg/share/texmf/web2c:
  /home/georg/share/texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf

> > However, I found the bug. tex-live appears to put all the ls-R
> > index files in a central directory, and consequently they cannot
> > be updated by a user. It follows that under tex-live, a user
> > texmf tree has to be searched explicitely without using an ls-R
> > index.
>
> What? The Debian/Ubuntu packages put ls-R files for /var/lib/texmf,
> /usr/share/texmf, /usr/share/texmf-texlive under /var and create links.
> Nothing else is done.
>
> If you call
> mktexlsr ~/texmf
> then you will get
> ~/texmf/ls-R
>
> The problem might be that there was an out-dated ls-R file NOT listing
> the texmf.cnf file. Right? In this case, please remove ls-R files in ~,
> they are useless.

Why is ls-R useless under ~?

1. Removing ls-R makes no difference.
2. Remaking ls-R makes no difference.
3. Changing texmf.cnf to ignore ls-R does make a difference.

The only hypothesis that I can see to explain this behaviour
is that ls-R at the root of the texmf tree is not found.
(Note that this is still where mktexlsr places it.)

I am not sure how much speed one would gain by using ls-R,
but it does work satisfactorily when I don't use it.
The undocumented behaviour is annoying, but I can live with it.

The previous setup had worked for years with tetex under previous
Ubuntu releases, other linux distroes and solaris.

I am convinced that the texmf.cnf was read all the time, but
that the texmf tree was not searched and the ls-R was not found.
It would be very odd if ls-R is used to locate texmf.cnf, as
texmf.cnf defines whether ls-R should be used or not.

Thanks for your time.

:-- George