[tex-live] texlive setup problems

Reinhard Kotucha reinhard.kotucha at web.de
Sat Jan 28 00:34:46 CET 2017


On 2017-01-27 at 10:21:34 +0900, Norbert Preining wrote:

 > >  > > ---! /home/cec/.texlive2016/texmf-var/web2c/pdftex/latex.fmt doesn't match
 > 
 > > Maybe it's better not to remove anything right now because Charles is
 > > able to reproduce the bug and can provide further information.
 > 
 > Reinhard, the bug is obvious to me. An *old* format is tried to be 
 > loaded into a newer engine. That is very typical.

Hi Norbert,
obviously, of course, but this is not what I mean.  Since pool files
were even abolished long time before TL-2013 was released, the actual
bug is that they are mentioned at all in error messages.

I would agree with you if a TeX system older than ten years is
involved but this is definitely not the case here.

If an inappropriate format file is loaded, I would expect that TeX
only reports a "Fatal format file error" but doesn't mention a pool
file.  The message we're talking about is misleading.  pdftex does
*not* load a (non-existent) pool file at all but complains that it
doesn't match.

I assume that Knuth's TeX checks whether the format file and the
binary match *and* whether the format file and the pool file match.
Newer engines, which are not aware of pool files, should do only the
first check.  They can't do the the second one anyway, otherwise
creation of format files will always fail.  Hence it's unclear what
triggered this error message.  This is also the reason I said that
someone who is familiar with TeX's internals can provide further
information and probably a patch.

In other words, the actual bug is not that a new binary found a stale
format file or vice versa but the misleading error message.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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