[tex-k] Problems for HOME with trailing "/"

[Daniel Hornung]

Hello,

not sure whether this is a full-grown bug or just a difficult to find 
annoyance.  A more formal description:

The problem:
kpsewhich (probably other kpathsea tools as well) are incredibly slow when 
called with ${HOME} having a trailing slash.  Calling e.g. xdvi took ~80 secs 
on this AMD X2 machine.  Executing "HOME=/home/<NAME> xdvi" resulted in 
normal speed.

My output from kpsewhich --version :
kpathsea version 3.5.5
Copyright 2005 Karl Berry & Olaf Weber.
There is NO warranty.  You may redistribute this software
under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
For more information about these matters, see the files named GPL and LGPL.
My system is a Gentoo Linux, platform: amd64, LaTeX distribution: tetex

I found this older mail with a similar problem:
http://tug.org/mailman/htdig/tex-k/2001-November/000302.html

If this cannot be fixed (maybe by parsing ${HOME} to remove any trailing 
slashes before applying it to other variables?) I would like to see a new 
item in http://www.tug.org/texinfohtml/kpathsea.html#Slow-path-searching 
noting about this problem, like so:
--
  * You are recursively searching your home directory.  This may happen 
inadvertedly when your ${HOME} environment variable ends with a slash ('/').  
Under Linux this can be changed by the system administrator in /etc/passwd.
--

Yours,
Daniel
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