[Tex/LaTex] tlmgr path add yields errors but makes symlinks

installingpathstexlive

Today (June 9, 2016), I've just installed TeX Live 2016 on my Ubuntu 14.04.4. The installation itself was successful, but when I tried to make symlinks for binaries, info pages, and man pages, path subcommand from tlmgr failed (I mean, the exit status $? was 1 after the path add). Strangely, however, most of the symlinks were made in proper directories. Here is what I did in the terminal.

$ cd /path/to/installer
$ sudo ./install-tl
$ which tex
tex not found
$ sudo /usr/local/texlive/2016/bin/x86_64-linux/tlmgr path add
tlmgr: action path returned an error; continuing.
tlmgr: An error has occurred. See above messages. Exiting.
$ which tex
/usr/local/bin/tex
$ for file in $(ls /usr/local/texlive/2016/bin/x86_64-linux/); do; which $file; done | grep "not found"
xindy.mem not found

I read the documentation about path, but I couldn't understand what was wrong with my procedure.

The lack of xindy.mem in $PATH won't harm me because it's very unlikely for me to use xindy package, but what happened to my installation? Do I need to do something to fix this?

Note (I'm not sure if this helps): Installing TeX Live 2015 on my El Capitan worked well in the exact same way a few months ago (the paths for tlmgr are different, of course).

On June 10, 2016, I tried re-installing TeX Live 2016 and could reproduce the same problem as yesterday.

$ sudo /usr/local/texlive/2016/bin/x86_64-linux/tlmgr path remove
tlmgr: action path returned an error; continuing.
tlmgr: An error has occurred. See above messages. Exiting.
$ which tex
tex not found
$ sudo mv /usr/local/texlive/2016 /usr/local/texlive/2016_bak
$ cd /path/to/installer
$ sudo ./install-tl
$ which tex
tex not found
$ sudo /usr/local/texlive/2016/bin/x86_64-linux/tlmgr update --self --all
$ sudo /usr/local/texlive/2016/bin/x86_64-linux/tlmgr path add
tlmgr: action path returned an error; continuing.
tlmgr: An error has occurred. See above messages. Exiting.
$ which tex
/usr/local/bin/tex
$ LANG=C; for file in $(ls /usr/local/texlive/2016/bin/x86_64-linux/); do; ls /usr/local/bin/$file; done | grep "No such file or directory"
ls: cannot access /usr/local/bin/man: No such file or directory

Regarding the last line, TeX Live 2015 on my El Capitan gives the same result. So, something seems wrong with the path add error on Linux.

$ for file in $(ls /usr/local/texlive/2015/bin/x86_64-darwin/); do; ls /usr/local/bin/$file; done | grep "No such file or directory"
ls: /usr/local/bin/man: No such file or directory

Best Answer

There is a bug in current tlmgr (or at least two would be better) that returns an error during the action tlmgr path add. Thanks for the report, I will fix it (in due time). I have checked the source but didn't find any obvious bug, but I will eventually fix it as I see the same behaviour.

Why on your side xindy.mem wasn't linked is strange, because in my case it was indeed linked.

Hope that helps

Norbert

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