TeX now vs. Tex in legacy version

[Ken Brown]

On 7/20/2012 2:25 PM, Achim Gratz wrote:
> Ken Brown writes:
>> On 7/20/2012 2:01 AM, Fergus wrote:
>>> 1. Currently, having recently upgraded, I can't use latex:
>>> $ latex a8.tex
>>> This is pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-2.4-1.40.13 (TeX Live 2012/Cygwin)
>>>    restricted \write18 enabled.
>>> ---! /var/lib/texmf/web2c/pdftex/latex.fmt doesn't match pdftex.pool
>>> (Fatal format file error; I'm stymied)
>>
>> It looks like something went wrong with your installation of
>> texlive-collection-latex.  See
>
> This happened to me as well when first upgrading from teTeX to TeXlive.
> The error message indicates that a different binary produced the format
> file than the binary that is now trying to use it.  When this happens
> after upgrading it seems to be related to a symlink not pointing to
> where it should (in this case there seems to be a latex.exe file where
> there should be a symlink from latex->pdftex.exe).  Since re-installing

There is no latex.exe in the Cygwin distribution.

> the whole of TeXlive takes so much time I just re-linked everything and
> ran the script that creates the format files.  I think the fact that
> some of these links are created from texconfig may be the source of the

The links are not created by texconfig.  For example, the link latex -> 
pdftex.exe is in the installation tarball for texlive-collection-latex. 
  So it should already be in place before any postinstall scripts are run.

> problem, maybe you could check if the installation really cleans all
> symlinks (and unexpected executables where a symlink should be
> installed) before creating the formats.  The executables generally
> seem to come from the updated distribution, so I think it may just be an
> interaction between some of the postinstall scripts.

I have no idea why some people are having this problem.  No one 
reporting the problem has sent any information from their setup logs 
that might indicate what went wrong.  They also haven't reported whether 
or not the texlive-collection-* postinstall scripts have run successfully.

Ken


--
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple