[tex-live] Re: path separator - deprecated or not

Olaf Weber olaf at infovore.xs4all.nl
Mon May 17 15:10:25 CEST 2004


Hans Hagen writes:

> Hi Olaf,
> While cleaning up some files i found this mentioned in a texmf.cnf on
> my system

> % You can use brace notation, for example: /usr/local/{mytex:othertex}
> % expands to /usr/local/mytex:/usr/local/othertex.  Instead of the path
> % separator you can use a comma: /usr/local/{mytex,othertex} also expands
> % to /usr/local/mytex:/usr/local/othertex.  However, the use of the comma
> % instead of the path separator is deprecated.
> %
> % The text above assumes thet path separator is a colon (:).  Non-UNIX
> % systems use different path separators, like the semicolon (;).

> Is this 'deprecated' still valid? If so, doesn't that make the config
> file system dependent and non portable? Since i see that the , is
> still used, i think that instead the platform dependent seperators in
> specs are deprecated (: as well as ;) in favor or a ,

To be clarified for libkpse, I think.

> actually, i got the impression that : and ; and , are all accepted as
> separators, so maybe 'deprecated' no longer is valid; the colon is
> dangerous since it can be a drive or other specs as well and if the
> new library supports url's as well ... maybe something different is
> needed then (although i think that the , is not used in any file spec
> on any system unless you use basenames with ,'s)

Colon only works on UNIX/Linux.  Semicolon works everywhere.

What we're heading to is probably one "common" syntax combined with
some support for platform-specific syntaxes.

> Hans

-- 
Olaf Weber

               (This space left blank for technical reasons.)



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