Dear TeX Live team, a Debian user has discovered a problem with the placement of created fonts: If there is already "something" for this font in TEXMFSYSVAR, newly generated font files for a user are placed in the current directory instead of their TEXMFVAR. I think the reason for this is that TEXMFSYSVAR is not in SYSTEXMF. Does anybody know why this is so? Is there any reason not to include TEXMFSYSVAR in the future?
Here are the details: With ${MT_FEATURES=appendonlydir:texmfvar} in mktex.cnf, generated fonts are preferrably placed in $TEXMFVAR. However, if fonts are needed during format creation (e.g. for cyrtex), and the format is created with fmtutil-sys, then TEXMFVAR is set to TEXMFSYSVAR, and the fonts end up there - a directory that is not writeable to users. Now when this format is used and more font files are generated from the same sources, mktexnam is used to determine the file placement, and mktexnam has the following priorities: - if there is already one file for this font at this size in an accessible tree, derivatives (tfm or pk derived from mf) are placed in the same tree - if this is a system tree, use TEXMFVAR instead - if the destination directory is not writable, use the current directory. TEXMFSYSVAR is not in SYSTEXMF, therefore, for pk fonts derived from those created in format generation, TEXMFSYSVAR is chosen as destination tree, and since this is not writable for users, files are created in the current directory. Regards, Frank -- Dr. Frank Küster Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)