tlmgr in a Ubuntu-installed texlive

[Marcel Fabian Krüger]

On Sun, Aug 02, 2020 at 03:06:01PM +0100, Philip Taylor wrote:
> [...]  A Debian user
> types
> 
> 
>     $ tlmgr update --list
> 
> 
> One assumes from your reply that TLMGR then responds :
> 
> 
>     (running on Debian, switching to user mode!)
>     TLPDB: Cannot determine type of tlpdb from /home/norbert/texmf!
>     tlmgr: running in usermode, did you call `tlmgr init-usertree'?
> 
> 
> I therefore repeat the question — why does TLMGR not know if the user has typed
> "tlmgr init-usertree" ?  It must have access to the parameters passed when it
> was called, so why does it need to ask the user what he/she typed ?

I think you misunderstood tlmgr's message: tlmgr does not try to ask the
user which arguments were passed, it already knows that in the current
invocation, init-usertree has not been used.
But tlmgr on Debian does require that "tlmgr init-usertree" is called at
some point, so it asks if the user did that, if s/he did call
"tlmgr init-usertree" at some undefined point in the past.

> 
> Philip Taylor