[tex-live] Value of TEXDOCS in texmf.cnf needs adjustment ?

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 14 December 2010 T T wrote:

 > On 14 December 2010 09:47, jfbu <jfbu at free.fr> wrote:
 > > I have a kind of auxiliary question [probably not important enough to create
 > > another topic]
 > >
 > > When I was fiddling with the texmf.cnf at the top of texlive/2010,
 > > I thought that it would be better for my modifications to be in
 > > texlive/texmf-local
 > >
 > > however kpsewhich does not find copies I created in texlive/texmf-local
 > >
 > > ~% ls /usr/local/texlive/texmf-local/texmf*
 > > /usr/local/texlive/texmf-local/texmf.cnf
 > >
 > > ~% kpsewhich --all texmf.cnf
 > > /usr/local/texlive/2010/texmf.cnf
 > > /usr/local/texlive/2010/texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf
 > >
 > > Wouldn't it be better if one could put a texmf.cnf in texmf-local?
 > 
 > It's not a god idea (as Zdenek wrote already), but you can---you just
 > used the wrong place---see the definition of TEXMFCNF kpse var:
 > 
 >   kpsewhich --expand-braces \$TEXMFCNF

No, you can't.  TEXMFDOCS is already set and will not be overwritten
by any file loaded later.  You can only change it before
TEXMFMAIN/web2c/texmf.cnf is read, for instance in
SELFFAUTOPARENT/texmf.cnf, which is provided by TeX Live but is empty by
default (contains just some explanations).

It doesn't make sense to have a texmf.cnf in TEXMFLOCAL because the
variable TEXMFDOCS controls the search strategy for *all* TEXMF trees,
regardless where it's set.  I suppose that Jean-Francois wants to have
a dedicated texmf.cnf in TEXMFLOCAL which controls only the behavior
of this particular tree, but this isn't possible.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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