pdflatex does not work on win after todays update but does on linux

[Siep Kroonenberg]

On Sun, Jun 13, 2021 at 05:17:43PM +0200, Andreas Hirsch wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Siep Kroonenberg schrieb am 13.06.2021 um 11:10:
> > On Sun, Jun 13, 2021 at 10:59:30AM +0200, Andreas Hirsch wrote:
> 
> > > But we should keep in mind this line from
> > > http://www.tug.org/texlive/windows.html#tlaunch
> > > 
> > > 'TeX Live is designed for shared use: you can install TeX Live on a network
> > > for use on client workstations. All it takes is adding TeX Live to the
> > > searchpath.'
> > > 
> > > Something must have changed on windows (or samba?)
> > 
> > The ISO version still works over samba.
> 
> That leads back to my initial assumption so I try a conclusion:
> 
> win32/pdftex.exe has not changed (dated 2021-02-25)
> win32/pdftex.dll has not changed (dated 2021-04-30)
> my enviroment (Win10 client, Samba-network-share) has not changed
> 
> LaTeX has changed to 2021-06-01
> 
> TeXLive2021 runs on Win10 from a Samba-network-share if it is before the
> LaTeX-Update (as reported by Siep see above) AND as it was true until my
> TeXLive was updatet
> 
> It stops working for this enviroment if LaTeX 2021-06-01 ist present
> 
> On the other hand LaTeX 2021-06-01 dont cause problems on local systems
> 
> So the combination of
> 
> Win10 + [(pdftex.dll + LaTeX 2021-06-01) + read from Samba-share]
> 
> seems the culprit.
> 
> But how to look further? Does the 'file-read-from-smabashare' turns
> pdftex.dll+LaTeX 2021-06-01 in thar state to crash?

It looks like it crashes when it loads the format file. Try

fmtutil-user --byfmt pdflatex

This worked with me, but of course this is not really solution: a
user-generated format file can shadow a more up-to-date and
incompatible system format file. And I double whether it would work
if the user profile were on a network drive.

-- 
Siep Kroonenberg