On Mon, 10 Jan 2011, Hilmar Preuße wrote:

> Renaud AUBIN <aubin <at> nibua-r.org> writes:
>
> Hi all,
>
>> I assume from minimals install script that you need to generate the
>> format with mtxrun --generate --tree="xxx" --some --options but failed
>> at this point…
>> Maybe Mojca or Arthur (as authors of bin/mtx-update.lua) could complete?
>>
>> Anyway, the post-install script packaged with that .deb doesn't seem to
>> do the job for you…
>>
> Ineed, we don't do this. What it the purpose of this command and how to call it?

Earlier, there were some troubles with ConTeXt MkIV working in a 
multi-user setup (I don't know whether that is still the case or not). 
Therefore, the user has to run mtxrun --generate. This step cannot be done 
at the post-install stage; it has to be done manually  by the user. So, 
the best solution is to display a message to tell the user to run this 
command manually (I do something similar for the context-minimals package 
for archlinux that I maintain).

> When running w/ option --generate I get:
>
> hille@sid:~ $ mtxrun --generate
>
> MTXrun | resolvers: variable 'SELFAUTOLOC' set to '/usr/bin'
> MTXrun | resolvers: variable 'SELFAUTODIR' set to '/usr'
> MTXrun | resolvers: variable 'SELFAUTOPARENT' set to '.'
> MTXrun | resolvers: variable 'TEXMFCNF' set to ''

This step is wrong (because the binary is in /usr/bin). Compare this with 
what one gets in texlive:

'TEXMFCNF' set to 
'{$SELFAUTODIR,$SELFAUTOPARENT}{{,/share,}/texmf{-local,.local}/web2c}'

Because of the wrong setting of TEXMFCNF mtxrun does not read texmfcnf.lua 
file, and the rest of the command fails.

You can try

TEXMFCNF=/usr/share/texmf/web2c mtxrun --generate

and that should generate the database correctly.

I don't know what TEXMFCNF is being set incorrectly.

Aditya