[tex-live] symlinks in $TEXMFHOME ignored

Jorge Scandaliaris jorgesmbox-ml at yahoo.es
Sun Nov 20 01:45:51 CET 2011


Jorge Scandaliaris <jorgesmbox-ml <at> yahoo.es> writes:

> 
> Hi,
> It took me a couple of hours to discover that symlinks in $TEXMFHOME are
> ignored. This definitely worked for me before (I already did this the past),
> probably with texlive2010. I am not sure if this is a bug in texlive, some
> configuration problem or something else. 
> 
> I installed texlive from my distribution (Ach linux) official repositories,
> as I did in the past. I created the '~/texmf/tex/latex' directories, and from
> there I created a symlink to the beamer package:
> 
> ~/texmf/tex/latex $ ln -s ~/sw/beamer-3.12/beamer beamer
> 
> This *does not work*! If I do instead:
> 
> ~/texmf/tex/latex $ cp -rf ~/sw/beamer-3.12/beamer .
> 
> then it works. Is there any option that tells texlive (actually kpsepath?) to
> ignore symlinks? 
>

I send this mesaage to the list in case someone else encounters the same
situation (and doesn't pay enough attention to kpathsea manual ;) ). 
As George N. White III suggested in a private email he sent me, the problem I
see must be due to some kpathsea limitations:

2011/11/19 George N. White III:
<snip>
>
> Is this your problem (quoting from the kpathsea manua):
>
> "Unfortunately, Kpathsea's subdirectory searching has an irremediable
> deficiency: If a directory d being searched for subdirectories
> contains plain files and symbolic links to other directories, but no
> true subdirectories, d will be considered a leaf directory, i.e., the
> symbolic links will not be followed. See Subdirectory expansion."
>
> If this doesn't apply then I suggest you start with a minimal example
> and use the kpathsea debugging features.

I created a dummy directory where I have the symlink, and now the package is
found correctly. 

Sorry for the noise,

Jorge



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