[OS X TeX] environment.plist pointer

[Adam R. Maxwell]

On Thursday, November 16, 2006, at 11:13AM, "Christopher Menzel" <cmenzel at tamu.edu> wrote:
>The uncontroversial bottom line of the discussion  
>seems to me to be that there are usually better, safer solutions to  
>the use of environment.plist to set paths and other env vars, and  
>that it should certainly not be widely recommended as a general  
>solution to env var problems, as it can lead to breakage that is  
>difficult for even somewhat experienced users to diagnose.

I think this is a good summary.  The main problem is that people forget that they set something in environment.plist, and problems thus created are difficult to diagnose for users and developers alike.

We experienced this with BibDesk: setting BIBINPUTS or another TeX-related environment variable caused TeX previewing to break.  Simple to work around, but it took a couple of years of random problems before someone figured out what was going on.

Adam
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