[tex-live] Light at the end of the tunnel

[Ken Brooks]

Today I succeeded in building a world in which the creation of tex.fmt 
almost worked.  It got almost to the end of plain.tex, then stumbled when 
trying to find hyphen.tex.  And it seems to me that hyphen.tex was where 
it should be:

> [kenb at test154 texshare]$ tex story
> This is TeX, Version 3.141592 (Web2C 7.5.5)
> kpathsea: Running mktexfmt tex.fmt
> fmtutil: running `tex -ini   -jobname=tex -progname=tex tex.ini' ...
> This is TeX, Version 3.141592 (Web2C 7.5.5) (INITEX)
> (/usr/share/texmf-dist/tex/plain/config/tex.ini
> (/usr/share/texmf-dist/tex/plain/base/plain.tex
> Preloading the plain format: codes, registers, parameters, fonts, more fonts,
> macros, math definitions, output routines, hyphenation
> ! I can't find file `hyphen'.
> l.1222 \input hyphen
> . . .
> 
> [kenb at test154 ~]$ kpsewhich -show-path hyphen.tex
> .:!!/home/kenb/.texmf-config/tex/kpsewhich//:!!/home/kenb/.texmf-var/tex/kpsewhich//:/home/kenb/texmf/tex/kpsewhich//:!!/usr/share/texmf-config/tex/kpsewhich//:!!/usr/share/texmf-var/tex/kpsewhich//:!!/usr/share/texmf/tex/kpsewhich//:!!/usr/share/texmf-local/tex/kpsewhich//:!!/usr/share/texmf-dist/tex/kpsewhich//:!!/home/kenb/.texmf-config/tex/generic//:!!/home/kenb/.texmf-var/tex/generic//:/home/kenb/texmf/tex/generic//:!!/usr/share/texmf-config/tex/generic//:!!/usr/share/texmf-var/tex/generic//:!!/usr/share/texmf/tex/generic//:!!/usr/share/texmf-local/tex/generic//:!!/usr/share/texmf-dist/tex/generic//:!!/home/kenb/.texmf-config/tex///:!!/home/kenb/.texmf-var/tex///:/home/kenb/texmf/tex///:!!/usr/share/texmf-config/tex///:!!/usr/share/texmf-var/tex///:!!/usr/share/texmf/tex///:!!/usr/share/texmf-local/tex///:!!/usr/share/texmf-dist/tex///
> [kenb at test154 ~]$ kpsewhich -expand-path '!!/usr/share/texmf/tex/generic//'
> /usr/share/texmf/tex/generic:/usr/share/texmf/tex/generic/config:/usr/share/texmf/tex/generic/hyphen
> [kenb at test154 ~]$ ls -l /usr/share/texmf/tex/generic/hyphen/hyphen.tex
> -rw-r--r--  1 kenb kenb 27860 Aug 21 10:59 /usr/share/texmf/tex/generic/hyphen/hyphen.tex
> [kenb at test154 ~]

So although /usr/share/texmf/tex/generic// is in the path, it couldn't 
find hyphen.tex.  And indeed, kpsewhich hyphen.tex comes up empty.  Although:
    kpsewhich -expand-path `kpsewhich -show-path hyphen.tex`
produces a (long) result which really does explicitly contain 
"/usr/share/texmf/tex/generic/hyphen".  Now I'm really surprised.  What 
could be lacking here?

-- 
Ken Brooks
rPath, Inc.