I run headfirst into that issue that 'texconfig' utility in the current tetex quietly changed its behaviour and, when run from a root account does not set anymore system wide configuration parameters but does that for 'root'. Until I received complaints that, for example, printouts are positioned badly on a page I was blissfully unaware that something is not right. Actually a while ago (2005-09-14 to be more precise) I wrote a bugzilla report about this here: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=168319
In a response I was eventualy (i.e. 2005-10-31) directed to http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.tex.tetex.general/954 which mentions that currently one should use 'texconfig-sys' (and 'fmtutil-sys' and 'updmap-sys') to achieve desired effects. Indeed, the current version of TETEXDOC.pdf does have a section about this (if you will start looking there). The problem with that is that all of this clearly violates "a principle of the least surprise". People who over years used 'texconfig' "know" how it works and undobtely I am far from the only one who fell into that trap. I understand that things do change but if somebody is trying to use 'texconfig' as root then there is currently a really serious chance that s/he is attempting a wrong thing. It does not seem to be a very hard to check; so at least in such situation a warning in a style "Are you really sure that you know what you are doing? Maybe you really meant 'texconfig-sys' instead?" could be displayed with a possible option that allows to suppress that if trully unwarranted. The same goes for other two utilities. That would go a very long way to alleviate the problem. Michal
