[tex-k] $SELFAUTODIR considered harmful

[Olaf Weber]

Olaf Weber writes:

> In my experience, SELFAUTO* is wonderful when you install a complete
> teTeX or TeX-live distribution, and things work without having to
> change (or even being able to write!) configuration files.

> It is a pain if you have binaries living in different locations that
> result in conflicting values.

> I'm not sure at this point what the best solution would be.

Sketching a bit.  The texmf.cnf file contains 4 kinds of information:

1 - The location of texmf trees.
2 - The order in which to search through those trees.
3 - Where to look within each tree.
4 - Web2C parameters.

For (1) it would be appropriate to be able to do something like
	TEXMFDIST = ../../texmf-dist
in texmf.cnf and have it work (starting from the directory containing
the texmf.cnf).

Of course, you don't want the directory of the texmf.cnf used when "."
is mentioned in a search path.

For (4) it is appropriate to move that information to a different file
altogether.

None of these musings solve the concrete problem at hand.  Even
implementing the use of ".." would take more extensive surgery in the
kpathsea sources than I can do at this time.

-- 
Olaf Weber

               (This space left blank for technical reasons.)