non-standard --user-link-target-directory on linux causes an error "Cannot derive the path prefix of the running executable."

[vlad312]

• I have read the MiKTeX Contributing Guidelines
  Greetings,

I performed a fresh install on Linux (debian). I'd like to install the executable links into ~/bin/miktex/ folder instead of ~/bin/
Here is how I configured miktex:

$ miktexsetup --user-link-target-directory=~/bin/miktex finish

$ cat ~/.miktex/texmfs/config/miktex/config/miktex.ini 
[...]
[Core]
LastUserMaintenance=1593694586
SharedSetup=0
UserLinkTargetDirectory=~/bin/miktex
[...]

$ export PATH=$PATH:~/bin/miktex

$ which latex
/home/vvv/bin/miktex/latex

$ latex
latex: Cannot derive the path prefix of the running executable.
latex: Data: canonicalized="false", bindir="/home/vvv/bin/miktex"

Sorry, but latex did not succeed.
terminate called after throwing an instance of 'MiKTeX::Core::MiKTeXException'
  what():  MiKTeX encountered an internal error.
Aborted

If I let miktexsetup to install the links into ~/bin/ it works, but specifying another directory such as ~/bin/miktex/ fails, despite this path being correctly saved in the miktex.ini file.

It seems that Libraries/MiKTeX/Core/Session/config.cpp checks some fixed paths, but it probably should check the value of UserLinkTargetDirectory from miktex.ini too.

[edocevoli]

Please run ls -l ~/bin/miktex/latex

[vlad312]

$ ls -l ~/bin/miktex/latex
lrwxrwxrwx 1 vvv vvv 22 Jul  2 16:37 /home/vvv/bin/miktex/latex -> /usr/bin/miktex-pdftex

[arrowd]

It seems, I'm having the same problem. All symlinks look correct, but I get the same error message from pdflatex tool.

[arrowd]

Any progress on this?