[tex-live] mktexlsr ignores "rcs" on a Windows 7 machine

Shinichi Sakata ssakata at interchange.ubc.ca
Wed Aug 18 10:07:29 CEST 2010


I regularly use TeXLive 2007 on my machines running Debian
Linux. Given my positive experiences with TeXLive, I recommended it to
my friend and installed TeXLive 2009 on her new computer a few days
ago. Her machine is running Windows 7. 

To test the installation, she ran LaTeX to process a document using
lots of packages. Unfortunately, she got a strange error message,
which says that rcs.sty is not found on the system. After checking
several things, I found that the cause of the problem was ls-R in the
texmf-dist directory did not contain lines for the directory rcs,
where rcs.sty lived. After playing with mktexlsr on her machine for a
few hours, I now suspect that mktexlsr simply ignores any directory
named "rcs" or "RCS" (and maybe rCS, rcS, etc., too).

On Linux machines, mktexlsr is a shell script. Looking at the one on
my machine, I have realized that mktexlsr on my machine strips off the
directories named RCS. Probably, the windows version of mktexlsr in
TeXLive 2009 does the same. Nevertheless, the capitalization could be
ignored on Windows platforms, depending on how mktexlsr obtains the
directory information. This may be the reason why mktexlsr does not
work correctly on my friend's machine.

Anyway, I hope that the problem will be corrected in the future
verions of TeXLive. To bypass the problem in the short run, I renamed
the directory "rcs" to "rcs1" and ran mktexlsr again. The problem is
gone now.

Best,

  Shinichi

==============================================================================
 Shinichi Sakata                 Phone: (604) 822-5360  / Fax: (604) 822-5915
 University of British Columbia  E-mail:ssakata at interchange.ubc.ca
 Department of Economics       
==============================================================================






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