It turned out that the problem was caused by kpathsea not being able
to find the config files. And the reason was that the box had been
converted from Red Hat to Debian, using the debtakeover script.
It seems that RH had an actual directory at
/usr/share/texmf/dvips/config
but Debian has a symbolic link there to /etc/texmf/dvips. The fossil
RH directory had a couple of files in it, but not what the texconfig
script needed when configuring dvips.
I had been able to make the right connection by supplying TEXCONFIG
as an exported environmental variable pointing to /etc/texmf/dvips.
Cleaning out the old RH dir and removing it, and replacing it with the
symbolic link, allows things to work as they should.
There is another symbolic link that needs similar treatment in converting
RH to Debian: /usr/share/texmf/doc should point to /usr/share/doc/texmf
but was a real directory on RH.
Sorry for the confusion; it took a while to discover this hidden
connection. Maybe install scripts should check to see whether directories
are real or the expected symbolic links?
-- A.T. Young
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