[tex-live] kpsewhich and texmf-var

[Frank Küster]

Hartmut Henkel <hartmut_henkel at gmx.de> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> is there a trick to get the right path in these cases:
>
> $ kpsewhich mktex.cnf
> /usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf/web2c/mktex.cnf
>
> $ kpsewhich texmf.cnf
> /usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf
>
> $ kpsewhich fmtutil.cnf
> /usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf/web2c/fmtutil.cnf
>
> $ kpsewhich XDvi
> $
>
> $ kpsewhich pdftexconfig.tex
> /usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf-config/tex/generic/config/pdftexconfig.tex
>
> (there are a few more)
>
> shouldn't they all be found under texmf-var? I thought maybe these are
> the paths as seen by the tools that edit these files, but even then once
> the file is existing in texmf-var, that one will be used. And obviously
> the engines find the right file below texmf-var anyway.

I'm confused, because in teTeX "the tools" (i.e. texconfig-sys,
updmap-sys --$edit_option) put the changed files in TEXMFSYSCONFIG, not
TEXMFSYSVAR, and I am not aware of differences between teTeX and TeX
Live in this respect.  Only the automatically generated files
(e.g. updmap's output and the format dumps) are in TEXMFSYSVAR.  So
pdftexconfig.tex seems to be at the right place.  

Where is actually XDvi?

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