Issue with updmap-sys use of symlinks in cross platform installation
John Collins
jcc8 at psu.edu
Mon Mar 18 02:09:37 CET 2024
Background:
I'm using TeX Live 2024 (and previous versions also) hosted on macOS, but with
a platform added for windows. (That's so that I can share the installation
with a VM running Windows, to let me do testing of latexmk, without the need
for yet another installation of TeXLive on the VM.)
With this set up, there are a couple of symlinks generated under
texmf-var/fonts: texmf-var/fonts/map/pdftex/updmap/pdftex.map and
texmf-var/fonts/map/dvips/updmap/psfonts.map These symlinks prevent pdflatex,
lualatex, xelatex, dvips and presumably others from working correctly under
some situations, when they are run from Windows. I get error messages about
Permission denied for those map files.
I didn't find a mention of this issue in the TeXLive documentation.
I have corrected the problem simply by running 'sudo updmap-sys --copy' after
an update by tlmgr, and that appears to cause no trouble.
Suggestion:
If I understand the code correctly, updmap.pl uses copy instead of symlinks
when it detects that it is being run under Windows, or that the file system
does not support symlinks, or that the --copy option is used. I would like to
propose that it also use copy when the windows platform is installed, even when
updmap.pl is being run under another OS.
Are there any significant downsides to this?
Perhaps there are other situations when copy is needed instead of making
symlinks, but updmap-sys does not detect the need.
John Collins
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