tetex FC6

[Ian Malone]

François Patte wrote:
> Ian Malone a écrit :
>> François Patte wrote:
>>> Bonjour,
>>>
>>> as a TeX user I very puzzled using TeX/LaTeX under FC6:
>>>
>>> 1- man is not up to date: it refers to initex (and some other init
>>> scripts for TeX which no longer exist...)
>>>
>> "If they exist, then both initex and virtex are symbolic
     ^^
>> links to the tex executable."
> 
> Nope!
> 

N.B. "if".  The man page then goes on to describe how tex can
be invoked to act as either of those commands.

>>> 2- as it took almost 10 seconds before latex begun to compile a file, I
>>> used strace to see why.... and I discovered that latex was reading all
>>> directories in my home dir to find the file it needed to compile my
>>> (small) test file!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
>>>
>> I can't reproduce this (and my home directory is quite cluttered),
>> A file that demonstrates this problem would be useful.
>>
> 
> Here it is:
> 
> \documentclass{article}
> 
> \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
> \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
> 
> \usepackage[french]{babel}
> 
> \begin{document}
> 
> Hello world
> 
> \end{document}
> 
> I used "script", then "strace latex test.tex"
> 
> Here is some extracts for the result file:

<snip>

> result file as 186898 lines and  14675968 Kb. I can send it anyone who
> claim it.
> 

Ouch.  Something is definitely wrong with your tex setup.
I'm not sure how that's happened, as Timothy Murphy suggests
you might want to try comp.text.tex.

> It seems that latex is looking for .texmf-config
> 

My texmf.cnf refers to TEXMFCONFIG = $HOME/.texmf-config,
although I don't have this file.  It's possible you have
it and it's interfering with standard tetex config.

>>> It is more and more like M$ which search a file in all possible
>>> directories instead of reading an uptodate database.
>>>
>> You refer to M$ in your other email as well.  I'm not sure why.
> 
> Because, from times to times I upgrade my linux boxes and I waste a lot
> of time to recover a "simple" configuration. Things are more and more
> hidden and, if you read this forum regularly or "comp.os.linux.setup" or
> "fr.comp.os.linux.configuration" and some other ones, you could see that
> people are more and more asking questions about "where is this
> written?", "where is this installed?".....
> 

<snip> This has nothing to do with Microsoft, and saying something
resembles the way they do things isn't really an argument for or
against.  It's better to deal directly with issues and why they
cause problems rather than trying to get support based on vague
anti-Microsoft sentiment (where does that get us?).  I actually
agree with you about the lack of documentation for configuration
files (particularly Gnome related stuff).

> 
>> I've never used Babel, but from the line in the line in the man
>> page (which you refer to):
>> "When called as initex (or when the -ini option is given) it can be
>> used to precompile macros into a .fmt file."
> 
> You have to use "fmtutils-sys" in the directory where TeX keeps its
> format files.... And it is not very clear if people can make their own
> formats without asking the system administrator.... It used to be so,
> when the "multi-users philosophy" was still prevailing!
> 

You can have per user tex trees.  Again, Google and ask at
comp.text.tex (http://support.math.arizona.edu/tex/accountpackages.php
looks like it might work).  Apart from running on Fedora, TeX has very
little connection to the rest of the system and has its own way of
doing things.

-- 
imalone