[tex-live] TeX Live 2010 : odd behaviour after moving to spare system on removable disc

Philip TAYLOR P.Taylor at Rhul.Ac.Uk
Tue Nov 8 00:34:41 CET 2011



Reinhard Kotucha wrote:

> This is a kpathsea variable and explained in the docs.  Try

Thank you, Reinhard : I have now examined the documentation
(TeXdoc kpathsea) and am now even more confused !

It says :

> Finally, it sets the environment variables SELFAUTOLOC, SELFAUTODIR and
> SELFAUTOPARENT to the location, parent and grandparent directory of the executable,

Now, SELFAUTOLOC makes some vague sort of sense : "this is
the automatically determined location of myself", where
"myself" is some arbitrary TeX binary; but "SELFAUTOPARENT"
to refer to the /grand/parent directory just blows my mind.
I am sure that Karl had a good reason to choose these names,
but they are not exactly self-explanatory, by any stretch
of the imagination !

Emacs : well, thank you, but no thank you.  It may be
a very small step for one man, but it would be a giant
leap too far for this geriatric VMS fan ...

** Phil.


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