[OS X TeX] Why does TeXShop want to re-build pdflatex format (and fail)

[jfbu]

Hi,

first let me apologize for noise.

I have found a note I had done on september 2
which says that the MacPorts binary kpsewhich
(or some tool it uses) has a hardcoded location
of texmf.cnf as

  /opt/local/etc/texmf/texmf.cnf

This note may be or not correct. Anyway at that time
I decided because of that to keep in my x86_64-darwinmacports
the kpse* binaries from x86_64-darwinlegacy.

It worked fine so I never came back to that.

Anyway, now
I decided to overwrite that file with the combination of

  /usr/local/texlive/2017/texmf-dist/web2c/texmf.cnf

and

  /usr/local/texlive/2017/texmf.cnf

I observe that with this set-up, TeXShop works happily.
(there is some LuaTeX config I should arguably
do as well).

To recap, the issue has very little or nothing
to do with TeXShop (sorry for thread title)
but is explained by the fact that my set-up worked
because I had in my environment some variables
for the TeXLive locations,

and I always execute the binaries

1) either from the command line,

2) or from Emacs/AUCTeX which is set-up to inherit
those environment variables.

Thus I did not realize so far
that without these variables, the pdftex from
MacPorts would have refused to be relocated
in such a brutal way inside the
TeXLive original tree.

In passing I notice that as my environment did
not set all variables, there was still perhaps
some influence from MacPorts config. I had
no issue with updates of TeXLive.

Nevertheless I now took the more drastic decision
to completely
overwrite the MacPorts texmf.cnf with the
original TeXLive2017 direct install one.

I am happy to report that TeXShop works like
a charm now.

I don't have the tools and knowledge to go
to more exact explanation and whether TeXShop
should inherit the user environment from
bash_profile and pass them to called processes.

Best,

Jean-François