[tex-live] compilation problems

[Karl Berry]

    I just downloaded the latest TL using rsync, not p4.  Are they the
    same?

Yes (modulo a 10-minute cron, which is not an issue here).

    If not, can you tell me how to download it with p4?  Maybe this is
    better anyway.  I have a p4 client installed already.

If you're not already familiar with p4, I don't advise going there.
Unless you want to commit changes, there is no gain to it.

    If no program makes use of this variable, I think that I can ignore
    the message.  

Yes, you can ignore the messages about texmfmain.

    The programs obviously compile properly.

Glad to hear it :).

    allrunes.map is in texmf-dist, not in texmf.  But texmf-dist is
    unknown at compile time.

Indeed.  There is no "real" problem here, it's just the bizarre way that
TL is constructed.  The Build script compiles everything and "installs"
it with a prefix of source.development/inst, as you probably realized.

But in order for the newly-made binaries to do anything useful, they
have to be manually moved to Master/bin/somearch and run from there (so
that the TL texmf-dist will be found, not to mention texmf.cnf and
everything else).

The fact that the make install tries to run updmap and complains about
missing maps isn't important.  That's only about the "data" part of the
tree in source.development/inst, which is purely temporary and never
used for anything.  (I make some desultory attempts to sync it with
Master/texmf from time to time.)

Yes, this is all very bizarre and unintuitive.

After this year's release, I plan to (a) get back to subversion, and
(b) write a web page about building TL.

Cheers,
k

P.S. I will be offline tomorrow and Monday.  Back Tuesday.