Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Sukneet Basuta <sukneet AT gmail.com>]

On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 11:17 PM, flux <flux AT sourcemage.org> wrote:
>
> 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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>

On my minimalistic install (not sure if that makes a difference) using
texlive's installer, latex and pdflatex are straight symlinks to
pdftex. There are no wrapper scripts.