[tex-live] test for 'main texmf tree' in kpathsea/withenable.ac

[Stefan Ulrich]

Hi!

I'm in the process of merging the updates from tex-live into the
xdvik development tree at
http://xdvi.cvs.sourceforge.net/xdvi/xdvik/texk/xdvik/
It seems there's been a lot of infrastructure improvements; especially
the autoconf updates make life much easier, since reautoconf now finally
works without hassle - thanks for the great work!

I've got a question about the test for the main texmf tree in
texk/kpathsea/withenable.ac. This test has recently been changed to be
silent about failures since it doesn't work inside the build directory:

    # (be silent) dnl AC_MSG_RESULT([not found])

but this causes a missing newline in the configure output:

   checking for archiver options (symbol ARFLAGS)... rc
   checking where the main texmf tree is located... checking for grep that handles long lines and -e... /usr/bin/grep
   checking for egrep... /usr/bin/grep -E

Could this test actually be removed altogether, since the texmf
locations that used to be set by this test have been replaced by
$SELFAUTOPARENT (and texmf.cnf is no longer generated from texmf.in
in the first place)?

FWIW, the change to no longer use configure-time paths for texmf.cnf
makes it a bit more difficult to install a self-compiled xdvik to a
nonstandard location (outside the texmf tree), in which case
SELFAUTOPARENT won't work. It seems that one would need to create a
custom texmf.cnf with the 'real' paths instead of SELFAUTOPARENT, or
is there an easy way to override SELFAUTOPARENT?

Best regards,
Stefan