Aditya Mahajan via ntg-context writes:
On Mon, 30 Aug 2021, Rainer J.H. Brandt via ntg-context wrote:
But, as I said, my texmf.cnf sets TEXMFCACHE to $TEXMFSYSVAR;$TEXMFVAR, and TEXMFSYSVAR is /var/opt/texlive. Why is that ignored?
mtxrun (and context MKIV and LMTX) do not read texmf.cnf rather read values from contextcnf.lua (it used to be texmfcnf.lua, not sure how TL handles this).
Thanks a lot. That put me on the right track. I see that this file is mentioned on the wiki, but I hadn't recognized its importance. I have found and edited texmfcnf.lua, and made progress.
You can also try setting it explicitly in the shell:
$ TEXMFCACHE=/var/opt/texlive/texmf-cache mtxrun --generate
I tried to avoid that, and thanks to your pointer above, won't need that. However, I'm still not completely happy: I've set TEXMFCACHE to contain /var/opt/texlive first and then also an individual directory under $HOME. When I run context under my personal account, it only uses the second. I assume that's because I may not write under the first. There's a comment in texmfcnf.lua about that. Does it perhaps make no sense at all to have a system-wide luatex-cache? Thank you, Rainer