[pdftex] kpathsea environment variables

Geoffrey Alan Washburn geoffw at cis.upenn.edu
Wed Sep 7 21:24:38 CEST 2005


Karl Berry wrote:

>    The question is how should this tool decide what is a kpathsea
>    variable and what is not?
>
>    query kpathsea to find out which language level arrays should be 
>    interpreted as kpathsea environment variables.
>
>Seems extending the output of kpsewhich --help to include the basic
>envvar names would probably suffice, do you agree?  I can't think of
>anything else feasible to do.
>
>It won't be perfect because the envvar list can vary with the
>application and/or actual argv[0], and it seems like these tools might
>not know the application being used (dvips vs. xdvi vs. tex vs. ...)
>But those envvars tend to be fairly obscure anyway, so it would probably
>be a useful subset to just get the generic ones.
>  
>
    Right, it would definitely be nontrivial to decide whether 
VAR_program applies because it would also require knowing whether 
"program" is installed.  My first program could just choose to be 
conservative.  I think for the case of omake, this will be fine, because 
it knows ahead of time whether it will be calling latex, pdftex, bibtex, 
etc. and can check for each basic variable whether the VAR_program 
variant exists.

-- 
[Geoff Washburn|geoffw at cis.upenn.edu|http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~geoffw/]



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