Problem with mktex* generated files when running latex on GCP cloud run

[Karl Berry]

Hi Norbert - re you wrote me separately, what is the filesystem of /tmp,
and the output of ls -lR /tmp/foobar?  In any case, how about using
TEXMFVAR=./mytmp or some such instead of /tmp? If . is a more normal
filesystem.

Those dir_links values do seem suspicious at first glance, and that can
cause kpse not to descend, namely if nlinks != 2; see "Subdirectory
expansion" in the kpathsea manual, and kpathsea/{elt-dirs.c,config.h}.

Unfortunately I don't seem to have defined a way to turn off the
st_nlinks trick at runtime (i.e., it's not per-filesystem). Maybe we
should do that for next year. If that's really the problem.

Another possible workaround would be to set TEXFONTS to look in all the
individual directories, though this would be painful:
  export TEXFONTS=:/tmp/foobar/fonts/tfm/lh/lh-t2a:/tmp/foobar/...

Will keep perusing ... -k