TeXLive 2013 update may require user intervention

TeXLive 2013 packages will be available soon in [extra]: users upgrading from TeXLive 2012 will likely encounter the following error message when trying to use a TeX engine (like latex, xelatex, luatex):

(Fatal format file error; I'm stymied)

You can recognize such a situation in the pacman output during installation:

>>> texlive: recreating all formats...
/usr/bin/fmtutil: line 395: /usr/share/texmf/texconfig/tcfmgr: No such file or directory
fmtutil: config file `fmtutil.cnf' not found.
 done.

To solve the situation, the simplest solution if you did not do any changes to files in /etc/texmf, is to overwrite configuration files with the .pacnew files installed by pacman. The pacdiff utility may be used for that purpose.

After merging the configuration files, run the following command:

fmtutil-sys --all > /dev/null

it should not return error messages: please open a bug report if you see any problems.

Removing TeXLive 2012 before installing TeXLive 2013 can also workaround the issue.