Public SourceMage Discussion List

[flux <flux AT sourcemage.org>]

Sukneet Basuta (sukneet AT gmail.com) wrote [11.08.24 12:02]:
> I recently installed the latest version of texlive (updated the spells
> to 20110705 for texlive and texlive-texmf) and I'm missing /bin/latex
> as well. Everything else seems fine but I'm far from knowledgeable
> about latex. I really only use pdftex.
> 
> I also did an install using texlive's installer (same version, but a
> minimal install). It seems to symlink latex to pdftex.

The issue of bin/latex being present isn't dependent on the version of
texlive. There's something else going on there that needs to be pinned
down, and it's entirely on our (the distro's) side. Thomas and I both
have them installed via the spell, but for some reason for others it's
not being installed - that is, it's completely missing from the install,
as opposed to present but containing a bug (described below). This is a
spell issue.

The issue that is "possibly" solved in newer versions of texlive (but
which no one has actually looked into yet) is the bug in the shell code
in the wrapper scripts (which happens to include bin/latex, which is
just a shell script that calls fmtutil and pdftex with appropriate
options). For some reason, there seems to have been a change in upstream
with the 2009 texlive that wasn't in 2008 (it worked fine in 2008),
requiring adding "-engine pdftex" to kpsewhich. This is described in
http://bugs.sourcemage.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15918. This is *possibly* an
upstream single-version bug that has been fixed more recently, but
nobody has yet actually checked.

-- 
Justin "flux_control" Boffemmyer
Cauldron wizard and general mage
Source Mage GNU/Linux
http://www.sourcemage.org

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