[tex-live] possible breakage of tl-paper on Ubuntu

Nelson H. F. Beebe beebe at math.utah.edu
Mon Dec 14 22:34:38 CET 2015


Thanks to several off-list exchanges with Norbert Preining today
(amazing, considering our 16-hour time difference between Utah and
Japan), we have a solution to the apt-get package manager breakage
from TeX Live software installed on Ubuntu 16.

It appears that the problem was that updmap-sys was not running
successfully during the initial package-recovery stage, due to
confusion from my environment variables.  I have consequently revised
my wrapper scripts to run the apt* utilities on Debian-packing-based
systems like this:

	PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin
	export PATH

	env -i HOME=$HOME PATH=$PATH apt-get COMMAND ARGS

The -i option on the last command clears the COMMAND environment, and
then the rest add HOME and PATH back in with controlled values.

By running updmap-sys manually with the above environment
restrictions, we got it to complete, and then subsequent "apt-get
install" commands would run successfully.

There are two files in the texlive installation tree that we initially
suspected of being the cause of the problem, given the perl syntax
error in my earlier message today:

	/usr/bin/tl-paper
	/usr/share/texlive/tlpkg/TeXLive/TLPaper.pm

The versions that come with Ubuntu 16 have copyright year ranges that
end in 2015; those from Debian 8.0 end in 2014.  We had temporarily
replaced the Ubuntu ones with those from Debian, but what really fixed
the problem seems to have been repairing the updmap-sys run.  I
therefore restored the two original Ubuntu files.

This kind of a problem is somewhat unusual, and possibly
site-specific, but I felt it worthwhile to document it on this list,
because others may hit it in the future.

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- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
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