[tex-live] Be careful setting TEXINPUTS when running with luatex and friends

[Michel Goossens]

Herbert, thanks, you're correct. For some reason which I don't remember, and since a very long time in my .bashrc file I had a line

export TEXINPUTS=.: 

'unsetting' this TEXINPUTS variable indeed solved the problem (I now also deleted this line from my .bashrc).

In the system-wide texmf.cnf file (.../texlive/2011/texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf) the LUAINPUTS variable includes a reference to TEXINPUTS. In the same file, a few line before, this TEXINPUTS variable is set in an engine-specific way

------------------------------------------ extract from texmf.cnf ------------------------------------
TEXINPUTS.lualatex      = .;$TEXMF/tex/{lualatex,latex,luatex,generic,}//
TEXINPUTS.luatex        = .;$TEXMF/tex/{luatex,plain,generic,}//
TEXINPUTS.dvilualatex   = .;$TEXMF/tex/{lualatex,latex,luatex,generic,}//
TEXINPUTS.dviluatex     = .;$TEXMF/tex/{luatex,plain,generic,}//
    ...
% Lua needs to look in TEXINPUTS for lua scripts distributed with packages.
LUAINPUTS = .;$TEXMF/scripts/{$progname,$engine,}/{lua,}//;$TEXINPUTS
--------------------------------------end extract from texmf.cnf ------------------------------------ 
Hence the interference between the luatex engine and the TEXINPUTS variable, I imagine.

Michel

---- Original question and answer -----
> Notwithstanding the fact that I rebooted my system (Linux 64 bits) twice and even reinstalled the whole of texlive this morning, I see the same behaviour as Herbert first observed before a reboot seemed to have forced the problem to go magically away.
>
> I am not so lucky and got stuck with the messages:
>
> ~$ mkluatexfontdb -v
>   ...goossens/texlive/2011/bin/x86_64-linux/mkluatexfontdb:12: module
>   'lualibs' not found:
> 	no field package.preload['lualibs']
>     	[kpse lua searcher] file not found: 'lualibs'
> 	[kpse C searcher] file not found: 'lualibs'
> ~$ uname -a
> Linux pcapsec1.cern.ch 2.6.32-131.6.1.el6.x86_64 #1 SMP Wed Jul 13 
> 09:00:34 CEST
>
> The file lualibs.lua is present both in the texmf-dist directory as 
> well as in the file ls-R

I have now the same behaviour again, lualibs is not found.
So investigated again and found the problem: I set TEXINPUTS to a specific value which is the source of the problem.  When I do a

unset TEXINPUTS

the lualibs.lua is found

Herbert