[tex-live] mptopdf problem: texmf.cnf not found.

Reinhard Kotucha reinhard.kotucha at web.de
Tue Aug 31 00:08:33 CEST 2010


On 30 August 2010 George N. White III wrote:

 > > It appears that somehow, MSYS interferes with my TeX Live install, and
 > > the search
 > > path is prefixed with "/msys/1.0".
 > > Please help!
 > 
 > When you move from an Msys process to a windows process, Msys tries
 > to adjust environment vars that look like paths from "Msys" to
 > "Windows" locations.  This certainly seems to be what you are
 > seeing.

I didn't encounter something like this on the MSYS version I installed
two or three years ago.  I ran TeX and Perl in an MSYS environment.
TeX Live doesn't set environment variables, so nothing unexpected
should happen.  But ActivePerl sets PERL5LIB and it worked without any
problems too.  Seems that you have a newer version of MSYS.  I don't
have access to the Windows machine anymore.  If newer versions of MSYS
really behave as you describe, I suspect they are buggy.

I don't know what "move from an Msys process to a windows process"
means exactly and I can't check myself.  The PATH variable seems to be
intact when a "Windows process" is called:

> Running the command c:\texlive\2009\bin\win32\fmtutil.exe

This program is invoked indeed because the message

> warning: kpathsea: configuration file texmf.cnf not found [...]

can't come from the shell.  If MSYS invokes external programs with a
broken environment, then kpathsea's debug facilities should provide
more information.

A quick and easy test to find out whether the problem is MSYS or TeX
Live related is to install Ghostscript.  The command

  gswin32c -help

prints the search paths to screen.  They depend on the env vars GS_LIB
and GS_FONTS.  Hence, if it's an MSYS issue, you should get different
results when you invoke the command from the MS-DOG command line and
from MSYS.

In this case it's best to consult the MSYS developer(s?).  As said
before, I didn't encounter any such problems with a two or three year
old release of MSYS.  The bug must be introduced recently.

Another thing comes to my mind: As I said before, the TeX Live
installer doesn't set any environment variables.  However, versions
older than TL-2008 set TEXMFCNF.  If there is such a leftover from an
older TL installation, everything is condemned to fail, even if you
run programs from the MS-DOG command line.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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