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My machine has a mixture of TeX systems dating from the eighties until today. I'm sending TeX files to an organization and I would like them to run smoothly (without errors or missing resources) on a standard TeX Live 2018 distribution.

How can I install a second up-to-date TeX Live distribution in some directory so that I can be sure that, once inside that directory, kpathsea will not use any resource from the surrounding hard disk, but only the files of the standard TeX Live distribution in that directory?

I know that this can be attained by using a virtual machine, but as virtual machines take a lot of space and are a bit heavy, I would prefer a method of obtaining the same results without using virtual machines.

yannis
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    If you are familiar with git, an option could be to use continuous integration.In that case, this might be helpful. – Abby Oct 24 '18 at 08:58
  • That would require opening an account on travis, preparing make files, etc. My question is: what would be the test file? How can travis assert that compilation of a latex file has succeeded? – yannis Oct 24 '18 at 09:25
  • In principle, all you need to do is ensure that the environment variables used by kpathsea and friends, and your PATH environment variable, only point to your TexLive2018 implementation. I don't really see how @Abby's comment is helpful (but I admit didn't spend much time looking at the GitHub link!) – alephzero Oct 24 '18 at 09:27
  • Using Travis you can specify which file it should compile (in the travis.yml, from the top of my head). The build will pass if the compilation has succeeded, and it will fail if the compilation did not succeed. – Abby Oct 24 '18 at 10:30
  • OK, but the error may be a semantic one (not a syntax error, not making TeX stop), and this travis will not detect, isn't it? – yannis Oct 25 '18 at 10:08

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You just need to use the binaries from the 2018 directory: all them set the default locations based on their installed location so they will only use the 2018 texmf-tree plus TEXMFHOME which defaults to ~/texmf so if you unset TEXMFHOME and use /usr/local/texlve/2018/bin/*/pdftex Then it will use 2018 texlive.

Of course if you use luatex or xetex it will (by default) also use the system fonts.

If you want confirmation you can use pdftex -recorder option and it will give a full list of all files used.

David Carlisle
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  • Let us imagine I have a directory called TESTING, and in that directory I put a texmf.cnf file with paths covering standard TeX Live 2018 as well as some subdirectories of TESTING. Will then every binary (pdflatex, makeindex, bibtex, etc.) I will launch inside TESTING use texmf.cnf and read the paths from it? Or do I have to tell the binaries explicitly that I want to use that texmf.cnf? – yannis Oct 25 '18 at 10:11
  • @yannis texmf.cnf will be read from the current directory but normally I don't need that if I want to test with tl2016 for example I just use /usr/local/texlive/2016/bin/x86_64-cygwin/pdflatex file and that binary will use the texlive 2016 tree then in the same directory I can go pdflatex file and it will use the 2018 tree. Obviously if you have local texmf.cnf in the current directory that changes things as both the binaries would read that config file and so use the same search tree. – David Carlisle Oct 25 '18 at 10:25
  • In the "private" texmf.cnf (the one that normally lies in /usr/local/texlive/2017/) there is a HOMETEXMF variable. Can that variable be a relative path ".", meaning the current directory where the file texmf.cnf is placed? Or must it be an absolute path? – yannis Oct 25 '18 at 10:53
  • I just tried it and the texmf.cnf used was that from the standard directories and not from the current one: kdebug:fopen(/usr/local/texlive/2018/texmf.cnf, r) => 0x7fff944e5030 kdebug:fclose(0x7fff944e5030) => 0 kdebug:fopen(/usr/local/texlive/2018/texmf-dist/web2c/texmf.cnf, r) => 0x7fff944e5030 kdebug:fclose(0x7fff944e5030) => 0 How can I force pdftex to read texmf.cnf from the current directory? – yannis Nov 10 '18 at 14:29
  • I found the answer in https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/410592/texlive-personal-texmf-cnf?noredirect=1&lq=1 – yannis Nov 10 '18 at 14:43