[tex-live] kpsewhich

[Olaf Weber]

Hans Hagen writes:

> concerning this shell expansion ...

> it seems already painful to support two operating systems
> (windows/unix+clones); imagine what would happen if nice alternatives
> like beos or amigaos or the acorn one had taken off (i.e if we had the
> diversity on enormally encounters, take for instance cars as a
> comparison) ... we would be in big troubles then, wouldn't we?

You mean in the way some cars have the break to the right of the
accelerator?

> so, maybe we should look at all scripts/tools and get rid of all
> things that somehow may interfere with os specific things, a kind of
> micro tex-os like environment built into kpse:

>    kpsewhich --envvar=WHATEVER

> then returns the meaning of $WHATEVER or %WHATEVER% or WHATEVER* the
> os env var is set to

This works for a single variable.  It does not work for more general
expressions, like

	kpsewhich -expand-path='{$SYSTEXMF}/fonst'

> this particularly starts making sense when kpse becomes a service
> (deamon) and speed is no issue

Variable expansion isn't going to move to the daemon: as a separate
process, possibly on a separate machine, it wouldn't be able to obtain
the correct values.

-- 
Olaf Weber

               (This space left blank for technical reasons.)