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Description of problem: After installing tetex-3.0-4 I got complaints from my users that something is wrong with configuration. Pages are positioned badly on a printout, hyphenation is not loaded as expected, ... This despite that I run 'texconfig' and it looked that things were ok. Digging around revealed that 'texconfig' used by root does not adjust a system-wide configuration any longer but it writes various files in /root/.texmf-config/ and /root/.texmf-var/ and this obviously cannot set system-wide defaults - like a paper size. If there is some warning about this drastic behaviour change I missed it and quick tests run while installing things did not reveal, obviously, anything amiss. I wasted quite a while before I caught what is really happening. It is nice that users can adjust things on an account-by-account basis but 'root' is special and _forcing_ users to do things which they may not fully understand/appreciate is not so nice any longer. To restore the previous texconfig behaviour one can simply make /root/.texmf-config and /root/.texmf-var into symbolic links to /usr/share/texmf and /usr/share/texmf-var respectively; but now these directories may actually exist and things are becoming messy. Sigh! Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): tetex-3.0-4
Maybe the message: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.tex.tetex.general/952 and a reply from Thomas Esser: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.tex.tetex.general/954 will be of some help here. Looks like some env variables need to be setup first. It's unlikely that the symlinks you've done are needed any more then. This looks more like a problem to be resolved upstream than here. So maybe you can go on with the thread and discuss this problem on the list directly with Thomas Esser. I'm on the list too, so as soon as a solution is found I can fix stuff in FC teTeX as well.
I guess that I will post something about that a tetex mailing list once I will figure out how to do that. I gather from quoted messages that not env variables are needed but one should now to use different utilities to tetex system wide. Namely texconfig-sys and possibly fmtutil-sys. These may work all right but that clearly violates a principle of the least surprise. Those who for years knew that texconfig is a proper and reasonable way to create system default settings are bound to be surprised even if TETEXDOC.pdf happens to mention texconfig-sys (assuming that one looks at the right version). A prominent warning when texconfig is run from a root account that most likely this is not doing what one think that it may be doing and chances are that you want and possibly texconfig-sys should be used instead.
Yes, tetex@dbs.uni-hannover.de is the right place to complain about user-space teTeX-3 problems. This is the official teTeX mailing list. You can subscribe to the list from http://www.tug.org/teTeX/.