[tex-live] Generating tex.fmt

[Karl Berry]

Hi Ken,

    Would someone be willing to take a 
    look and find the gem of truth in this mass of output?

What appears on standard output after
kpathsea: Running mktexfmt tex.fmt
?

    and makes no mention of mktexfmt or of generating .fmt files.  

I (or someone :) will have to try to improve that.  Anyway, the basic
answer is that mktexfmt should be a link to fmtutil.  fmtutil reads
fmutil.cnf (your log says it was found in
/usr/share/texmf/web2c/fmtutil.cnf).  fmtutil.cnf should have a line
like this:
tex		tex		-		tex.ini
which says "to build tex.fmt, run tex on the file tex.ini".

But your log does not mention tex.ini.  So I'm lost at that point.

tex.ini is a tiny four-line file:
% Thomas Esser, 1998. public domain.
\input plain
\dump
\endinput


Meanwhile, on a completely different front, your setup seems to have
much more in common with Debian than with the usual all-in-one-dir TL
setup.  I wonder if it would actually be easier for you to adapt
Debian's packages than to start from the original sources.  As I recall,
they had to modify a number of config files to make things work.  Frank,
Norbert?

Hope this helps,
Karl