[tex-live] mptopdf problem: texmf.cnf not found.

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 12:06, Byung-Jae Kwak wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 7:55 AM, George N. White III wrote:
>
>> See the entry "A tail about the Windows Unix shells and MSYS path mangling"
>> <http://curiousprogrammer.wordpress.com/2010/03/13/enablers-and-obstructors>
>> for some examples.
>
> I am not versed in UNIX enough to understand the blog entry.
>
> But, even assuming MSYS has a problem, I still don't understand why
> this is hapenning. mptopdf is not an MSYS application. If I did not have
> MSYS installed, I would not be having this problem. Am I wrong?

Judging from PATH, you probably have no special version of Perl
installed, so it is quite possible that Perl is being called from MSYS
and that one might mess up some paths.

A while ago I had a problem on computer where ruby was installed under
cygwin which prevented ConTeXt to work properly.

You may try two things (separately, not both at once):

- Before you install perl, remove all the msys-related variables from
PATH (Do you know how to set path in bash without having to mess with
system-wide settings?) My guess is that it might not work at all if
there's no perl installed.

- Install perl (you don't need to install it, it should be enough to
extract it to some folder) and make sure that path to "native perl"
comes before msys. It's quite possible that Perl gets installed with
TeX Live, so it might be enough to figure out where Perl was installed
and only set the path to see that folder.

Mojca

PS: it is completely unrelated, but if you are interested, here's the
complete thread:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.ruby/browse_thread/thread/50b3c1b275cd0c6d?pli=1