[pdftex] kpathsea environment variables

[Karl Berry]

    > that it doesn't have some way of listing/querying which environment
    > variables it is currently configured to examine.  

As Thomas mentioned, it is an open-ended list.

If you run kpsewhich --debug somefile.someext you will see exactly what
it searches for, although admittedly that's not a user-friendly list of
environment variables.

It would not be hard to add some kind of option to list the envvars
searched for a given (or all) file types, or perhaps include the info in
the --help output.  (A related suggestion, from Nelson Beebe, is to be
able to show the variables/config values/etc. when a search fails.  I
guess they didn't make it into this year's code, unless I'm missing it.)

Anyway, before actually making changes, I'm not sure environment
variables are enough (as I believe Thomas also mentioned).  In practice,
most values are set in the texmf.cnf config file, not via environment
variables.

So, Geoff, what are you really trying to do?  Can you give any more
details?

    I'm Cc'ing Karl who's doing much of this work.

I am not working on the new (or current for that matter) kpathsea at
all.  As far as I know, Olaf Weber (the current maintainer) is the only
person writing the code.

Best,
karl