Latex format file bugs in Fedora 13

[Zbigniew Fiedorowicz]

This is a long standing bug in Fedora dating back to at least version 9, 
which not only hasn't been fixed, but has gotten worse in Fedora 13.

The problem is that texlive does not install Tex format files in a 
system-wide accessible directory.  Rather it creates these format files 
in each users home directory within a subdirectory named .texlive2007 
whenever the user invokes (pdf)latex. This is especially annoying if 
Latex is invoked by a server daemon, such as httpd.  Then Latex attempts 
to create .texlive2007 subdirectory in what it considers to be the 
daemon's home directory, such as / or /var/www/. Of course it doesn't 
succeed because the daemon doesn't have write permissions to these 
directories.

In Fedora 12 and earlier, there was a simple way to fix this:
fmtutil --missing
would create the format files in /var/lib/texmf and afterwords Latex 
would use these format files instead of creating new ones in users' home 
directories.

In Fedora 13, fmtutil does create the format files in /var/lib/texmf, 
but Latex ignores them and continues to recreate them in users' home 
directories.

To see this bug in action, create a tex file say /tmp/test.tex and run 
the following commands
su -
fmtutil --missing
su -s /bin/bash apache
pdflatex /tmp/test.tex

You will get the following error:

This is pdfTeXk, Version 3.141592-1.40.3 (Web2C 7.5.6)
  %&-line parsing enabled.
kpathsea: Running mktexfmt pdflatex.fmt
fmtutil: format directory `/var/www/.texlive2007/texmf-var/web2c' does not
exist.
I can't find the format file `pdflatex.fmt'!