After someone complained to me that he can’t install culmus-latex on Ubuntu 11.10, I decided to check the issue. Apparently culmus-latex can’t be installed as-is on Ubuntu 11.10 (and probably other new versions of Debian and Ubuntu). The problem have been reported in few places such as Whatsup, but as I don’t frequent the forum lately, I wasn’t aware of it. Skip bellow if you’re just interested in the workaround.
Technical Details
The problem manifests itself as:
sudo make install
... snipped for brevity ...
mktexlsr: Done.
updmap-sys --enable Map=culmus.map
updmap: This is updmap, version $Id: updmap 14402 2009-07-23 17:09:15Z karl $
updmap: using transcript file `/var/lib/texmf/web2c/updmap.log'
updmap: initial config file is `/var/lib/texmf/web2c/updmap.cfg'
make: *** [install] Error 2
But if you look at updmap’s manpage there is no documentation for the return codes. Also there is no explicit place where it exits with return code 2 in the code. After some straceing I found the culprit in the combination of the set -e in the top of /usr/bin/updmap and the function pickLocalFile in /usr/share/tex-common/debianize-upddmap which overrides certain behaviors in updmap. The pickLocalFile uses the following lines
localfile=""
localfile="`ls $debDirname/*local*cfg 2>/dev/null`"
if [ -n "$localfile" ]; then
To check if there is a local configuration file under /etc/texmf/updmap.d. If such file doesn’t exist, instead of creating one (as the maintainers of debianize-updmap intended) it fails due to the set -e in /usr/bin/updmap. Thus updmap exists with error code 2, instead of completing the installation.
Meanwhile, until the bug is fixed, there is a simple workaround
Workaround
Before installing, execute
sudo touch /etc/texmf/updmap.d/10local.cfg
And now the regular sudo make install installation should finish successfully.
As the problem is a result of a Debian bug, I don’t expect to release a new version of culmus-latex, instead I’ll report the bug to the Debian team.