[tex-live] comma versus colon in texmf.cnf

Karl Berry karl at freefriends.org
Thu Jun 14 01:44:12 CEST 2007


I changed the comments in texmf.cnf.

Comma is not deprecated as a brace element separator {foo,bar} as far as
I'm concerned.

It appears that only : can be used as a brace element separator on Unix:
  $ kpsewhich --expand-braces='a{b;c}'
  ab;c
shows no expansion, while
  $ kpsewhich --expand-braces='a{b:c}'
  ab:ac
is correctly expanded.  That seems like a deficiency (patches welcome,
I'm not going to work on it), because ...

... either ; or : can be used for path element separator in texmf.cnf,
regardless of the underlying system convention.  E.g., these are
equivalent in texmf.cnf:
TEXINPUTS = /some/dir:/another/dir
TEXINPUTS = /some/dir;/another/dir

I believe, though I haven't checked, that either : or ; can be used in
environment variables on Unix.  On Windows, I believe only ; can be
used, due to Windows limitations (I was told).

Hope this muddies the water sufficiently ,;:).

karl


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