I'm sure that the placement of this file does not comply with FHS: /usr/share/texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf Relevant parts from FHS: http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#USRSHAREARCHITECTUREINDEPENDENTDATA "Any program or package which contains or requires data that doesn't need to be modified should store that data in /usr/share" http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#ETCHOSTSPECIFICSYSTEMCONFIGURATION "The /etc hierarchy contains configuration files. A "configuration file" is a local file used to control the operation of a program; it must be static and cannot be an executable binary."
Also, clearly Gentoo cares about FHS since a recent weekly newsletter mentioned that portage is now FHS compliant and it looks like some work was put into making it so. http://www.gentoo.org/news/20041021-portage51.xml Having texmf.cnf in /etc/ means it will get backed up by my daily backup script which backs up /home /usr/share/local and /etc
>Also, clearly Gentoo cares about FHS Tell this all the decelopers of software, who not care... ;)
This is taken care of in >=tetex-2.96 (aka teTeX-beta, which is going to be released at the end of this year). I will not fix it in <tetex-2.96. See also bug #56440 and bug #60845.
