Hi Frank,
> understood, but I thought that these days the majority of installations are
> in fact single user machine installations where the "sys" part really serves
> typically a single user.
Agreed.
> So my thought was that you get already a huge improvement if a "sys" update
> is checking if the current user also has local formats and if so warns about
> that and/or offers to update those as well
How would that work if the -sys part is run as root? Should we query
systemd/logind who is logged in? Of course, we could parse /etc/passwd
and search for users, and if there is say less than 5 non-privileged
users, we search in their home directories. But all this is shaky,
prone to errors.
What we already do is *if* the user running updmap-sys has files in TEXMFVAR,
then he will get a warning:
The following files have been generated as listed above,
but will not be found because overriding files exist, listed below.
....
Perhaps you have run updmap in the past, but are running updmap-sys
now. Once you run updmap the first time, you have to keep using it,
or else remove the personal configuration files it creates (the ones
listed below).
This check hasn't been carried over to fmtutil by now, but I can look into
this.
But this only helps if the user owning the TL installation is also the
actual user, but we often have root owning the installation.
> but isn't it the case that if I install TL on my laptop (for all users, even
> though I'm the only real one) that then all future updates will just update
> the formats in the sys tree which is precisely the problem we see?
Yes, updates via tlmgr will call the -sys variants, so generated files
go into TEXMFSYSVAR.
> and honestly the fact that way back I was warned that I do a local install
> may not be something I remember by then (like the user in this thread who
> didn't remember having produced the local format)
I know I know. But most of these errors come from documentation specifying
that
you should run updmap/fmtutil
which in fact was true long time ago, but isn't any more, also since long.
OTOH, people reading the outdated docs will get a warning and at least
they have to think once ...
All the best
Norbert
--
PREINING Norbert http://www.preining.info
Accelia Inc. + JAIST + TeX Live + Debian Developer
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