[tex-live] texdoc in luatex

Frank Küster frank at kuesterei.ch
Mon Jul 23 12:56:09 CEST 2007


David Kastrup <dak at gnu.org> wrote:

> Frank Küster <frank at kuesterei.ch> writes:
>
>> David Kastrup <dak at gnu.org> wrote:
>>
>>> What I am proposing is a behavior where _both_ : and ; work as path
>>> separators, with the exception that : after a _single_ letter is
>>> not a path separator.
>>
>> That works as long as we are sure that a variable contains only
>> paths.  It does not generally work with stuff like
>>
>> $ grep TEXDOC src/Upstream-source/TeXLive/Build/source/texk/kpathsea/texmf.in
>> TEXDOCSSUFFIX   = ;.pdf;.ps;.dvi;.html;.txt;.tex
>> TEXDOCSCOMPRESS = ;.gz;.bz2;.zip;.Z
>> TEXDOCEXT       = {$TEXDOCSSUFFIX}{$TEXDOCSCOMPRESS}
>>
>> (it does in this particular case, because the `.' separator is included,
>> and because `Z' comes last, but that's a lucky coincidence).
>
> Whoever considered it a good idea to use path_separator for non-paths?
> It's not like don't have enough trouble already.

I don't remember.  It might well be that it was a former Debian teTeX
maintainer, or it was TE when writing texdoc. Anyway, somehow it made
its way into the TeXLive texmf.cnf.

How could it be done differently, without loosing the feature that
--expand-brace will nicely create pairs of zipped and unzipped file
extensions.  (In Debian, we actually have

TEXDOCSSUFFIX = :.pdf:.dvi:.ps:.txt
TEXDOCSCOMPRESS = :.gz:.bz2
TEXDOCHTML = .html
TEXDOCEXT = {$TEXDOCSSUFFIX}{$TEXDOCSCOMPRESS}:{$TEXDOCHTML}{$TEXDOCSCOMPRESS}

which gives

$ kpsewhich --expand-brace='$TEXDOCEXT'
:.pdf:.dvi:.ps:.txt:.gz:.pdf.gz:.dvi.gz:.ps.gz:.txt.gz:.bz2:.pdf.bz2:.dvi.bz2:.ps.bz2:.txt.bz2:.html:.html.gz:.html.bz2

)

>> So either we decide now to not allow non-path information in
>> kpathsea list variables, or we shouldn't be too bold with
>> introducing "clever" heuristics.
>
> Or treat path lists differently.

That would require to define a new list type in kpathsea first, wouldn't
it? 

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)


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