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

Heiko Oberdiek heiko.oberdiek at googlemail.com
Tue Nov 8 16:43:32 CET 2011


On Tue, Nov 08, 2011 at 02:36:47PM +0000, Philip TAYLOR wrote:

> Philip TAYLOR wrote:
> 
> >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 !

> So now, a new question.  What do SELFAUTODIR and SELFAUTOPARENT
> add ?  Why can I not replace the former by $SELFAUTOLOC\.. and
> the latter by $SELFAUTOLOC\..\.. ?  Why are the latter two needed
> at all ?

My guessing of this issue is:

In teTeX the binaries could be placed directly in 'bin':

  root/texmf-dist/
  root/bin/tex

or with another level for the machine type to support network
installations:

  root/texmf-dist/
  root/bin/i386-linux/tex

Probably the name "SELFAUTOPARENT" comes from an early time
of the first directory layout and is later also used for
the second directory layout. The point of SELFAUTOPARENT
is to find the texmf trees, thus the meaning of the variable
extended to "parent of self" or "grand parent of self".
Thus SELFAUTOPARENT is shorter than SELFAUTOPARENTORGRANDPARENT
or even SELFAUTOPARENTORSELFAUTOGRANDPARENT.

Yours sincerely
  Heiko Oberdiek


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