I got bumped by another "whack-quietly-from-behind" problem with a tetex system configuration. This happened with a default installation of tetex-3.0 on FC4 (more precisely - tetex-3.0-6.FC4 and related packages there).
After an initial installation you can see there $ texconfig-sys conf | grep updmap.cfg /usr/share/texmf/web2c/updmap.cfg So far so good. The file exists, is correct and everything works like expected. Now I am installing some additional fonts and I run updmap-sys, without specifying explicitely where is updmap.cfg to use. Surprise! After that operation, if I bother to check, I see: $ texconfig-sys conf | grep updmap.cfg /usr/share/texmf-config/web2c/updmap.cfg Now, this is not a disaster. Yet! A new config file does cover what was in the old one plus new maps. It may turn out to be a disaster if some other changes (say, future updates to tetex packages on FC or something else) will modify /usr/share/texmf/web2c/updmap.cfg. That will be "hidden in a shadow" by whatever happen to be in /usr/share/texmf-config/web2c/updmap.cfg. Besides as a principle I dislike very much a situation where duplicate configuration files show up on a system out-of-blue. This is a recipe for confusion and who knows what unintended consequences will turn out now or later; not mentioning that in the future I may, for whatever reasons, modify one of those configuration files, it will turn out that this was a "wrong" one and I will be scratching my head why things "do not work". This is most likely a consequence of that that in /usr/share/texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf one can find: TEXMFSYSCONFIG = /usr/share/texmf-config You can say that whomever was packaging tetex-3.0 for Fedora should know better. But he did not, overlooked, had a bad day, whatever and things are like they are. An easy mistake to make. At least with 'updmap-sys' one can, if aware of the situtation, work around the issue with something like that (bash code): cnffile="$(texconfig-sys conf | grep updmap.cfg)" updmap-sys --cnffile "$(cnffile)" ... <whatever> but I think that this should really be a default behaviour in order to avoid surprises like the one described. I am not sure at this moment what else can get me the same way but probably anything which can rewrite some .cfg file (outside of 'vi, of course :-). Michal
