[tex-live] relocatable texlive?

[Khaled Hosny]

On Sun, Aug 01, 2010 at 01:40:30PM +0200, Michel Goossens wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I tried to generate a texlive tree on a portable USB-connectable hard disk on a Linux system. At first sight everything seems to be relocatable, but when I mounted my portable disk on Windows under cygwin xetex did not find any truetype or opentype directories. I "grepped" all files in the texmf trees, and found one file, texmf-var/fonts/conf/texlive-fontconfig.conf,
> which has explicit absolute filenames to list the font directories. Its contents is shown below.
> <?xml version="1.0"?>
>   <!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
>   <fontconfig>
>   <dir>/media/usbdisk/texlive/2010/texmf-dist/fonts/opentype</dir>
> <dir>/media/usbdisk/texlive/2010/texmf-dist/fonts/truetype</dir>
> <dir>/media/usbdisk/texlive/2010/texmf-dist/fonts/type1</dir>
> </fontconfig>rectories 
> 
> This prefix /media/usbdisk is the one the system assigns on my Linux fedora-based OS. On windows, the disk is mounted on the  E: disk (or /cygdrive/e/). I wonder, why in the texlive-fontconfig.conf file the directory names are not relative to the root of the texlive setup (texlive/2010 in this case?) as are all the other files that contain file lists (e.g., ls-R). 

May be ecause fontconfig does not handle relative paths (it is system\
library not bound to TeX).

-- 
 Khaled Hosny
 Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team
 Free font developer