RE: texmf

["Roth, Kevin P." <KPRoth at MarathonOil dot com>]

I tried this out (in the context of LilyPond, which I was not familiar
with, but which looks like a great tool! kudos for making this available
via cygwin!!!).

I found that the setup process for texmf-base created a file
(/usr/share/texmf/web2c/pdftex.fmt) with less-than-optimal permissions.
The file /usr/bin/fmtutil (supplied by tetex-beta it seems, so Jan may
not be able to address this) creates some temporary files in the
directory pointed to by $TMP. When it's finished, it `mv`'s them into
place at /usr/share/texmf/web2c.

On a Windows 2000 machine, the default location for the $TMP directory
is actually a TEMP directory underneath of each user's personal W2K
profile (documents&settings) directory. This directory only has read
access for the user himself and for System and Administrators. A `mv`
command doesn't adjust file permissions to match the directory it's
being copied into (at least on NT/w2k/XP), whereas a `cp` command does.
Which means that when the texmf-base package used fmtutil to create the
file /usr/share/texmf/web2c/pdftex.fmt, the file permissions were such
that only the installing user could read it. 

So, when I tried to test out lilypond (running as a different user than
my administrative account, which was used to install these files), it
failed. I dug down and realized that the perms on these web2c files were
wrong, so I fixed 'em, and then figured out why.

Whoever is maintaining tetex-beta, would you please change the two
places in fmtutil where it performs a `mv`, so it instead performs a
`cp` followed by an appropriate `rm`?

Thanks,
--Kevin




-----Original Message-----
From: Jan Nieuwenhuizen [mailto:janneke@gnu.org]
Sent: Monday, December 03, 2001 4:16 PM
To: cygwin-apps@cygwin.com
Subject: RFP: texmf

As announced earlier, I'd like to contribute a set of texmf packages
from teTeX that match contrib/tetex-beta.  Its previous incarnation
received some positive comments already.