Bug#377581: tetex-base: Creating of missing formats failed with dpkg --configure started in /usr/bin
Oliver Cordes <ocordes@astro.uni-bonn.de> wrote:
> Package: tetex-base
> Version: 3.0-19
> Severity: normal
>
>
> Due to some problems on my machine I had to install tetex-bin manually
> with dpkg -i tetex-bin_... . During the configure step I got the error
> that some of the formats can't be built. In the refered file in /tmp I
> found the following lines:
>
> fmtutil: running `pdfetex -ini -jobname=amstex -progname=amstex
> -translate-file=cp227.tcx *amstex.ini' ...
> This is pdfeTeX, Version 3.141592-1.21a-2.2 (Web2C 7.5.4) (INITEX)
> (/usr/share/texmf-tetex/web2c/cp227.tcx)
> entering extended mode
> (/usr/share/texmf-tetex/tex/amstex/config/amstex.ini
> (/usr/share/texmf-tetex/tex/generic/config/pdftexconfig.tex)
> (/usr/share/texmf-tetex/tex/plain/base/plain.tex
> Preloading the plain format: codes, registers, parameters, fonts, more
> fonts,
> macros, math definitions, output routines, hyphenation
> (/usr/share/texmf-tetex/tex/generic/hyphen/hyphen.tex)) (/usr/bin/amstex
> ! Text line contains an invalid character.
Strange that it says "(/usr/bin/amstex", on my system it's "(./amstex".
But anyway.
> The reason for this is that I started the dpkg job in /usr/bin , so that
> the amstex binary was included instead of the amstex-TeX-file.
>
> Please make sure that pdfetex is started in a proper directory (e.g.
> the direcorty of all the templates) despite of the directory dpkg is
> started. Using apt-get -f install to configure tetex-base on the other
> hand works normally.
Hm, I don't think this makes sense, or is even doable. It's a feature
that TeX reads files in the current directory - a feature that can also
be used for generating customized formats.
On the other hand it (the feature) probably doesn't make any sense in
the post-installation script. We could fix this by changing directory
to / or /tmp. But we cannot be sure that there isn't a file "amstex" in
any of these directories.
I think it isn't unreasonable to expect that someone wants to create a
file "amstex" in /tmp, for whatever reason. But I can't think of a
reason to change directory to /usr/bin. Why did you do it?
Regards, Frank
--
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX)
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