[XeTeX] XeTeX compile error in Gentoo Linux

[Jonathan Kew]

On 29 May 2006, at 2:07 pm, Ralf Stubner wrote:
>
> On Debian, /usr/share/texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf is a symlink to the
> /etc/texmf/texmf.cnf. In addition, Debian uses a shared libkpathsea  
> such
> that tex at all don't know about such compiletime defaults. I haven't
> tried building XeTeX that way, though, and I don't know if that is  
> also
> done on Gentoo.

I expect it could be done, though the "normal" TL approach seems to  
be static linking.

>
>> The real question, though, is why the xetex configuration gets this
>> wrong, giving you incorrect definitions in paths.h during the build.
>
> Maybe because you are searching for 'hyphen.tex', which is probably
> below /usr/share/texmf. I think XeTeX needs compiletime defaults only
> for finding texmf.cnf. After that, the paths defined in there  
> should be
> used. So it might make sense to use 'kpsewhich texmf.cnf' instead.

Ah, you're probably right. I think when I was first trying to get  
something built, I picked hyphen.tex pretty much at random as a file  
likely to be found in the texmf tree - and I wasn't dealing with  
systems where the web2c config stuff is separated completely from the  
main texmf tree. But clearly that's an issue for some systems.

IIRC, I was also a bit nervous of relying on the location of  
texmf.cnf as there seem to be multiple texmf.cnf files, and I didn't  
have a good grasp of the implications of this.... e.g., on my Mac OS  
X system, "kpsewhich texmf.cnf" and "kpsewhich --format='web2c files'  
texmf.cnf" find different files.

But I'll take a look at this and see if we can make things better.  
Thanks!

JK