[tex-live] comma versus colon in texmf.cnf

Frank Küster frank at debian.org
Wed Jun 13 16:04:42 CEST 2007


Hi,

Ralf Stubner <ralf.stubner at web.de> wrote:

> PS: According to the begining of texmf.cnf the usage of ',' is
> deprecated. Is that new?

I don't know whether it is new (nor what qualify as new in the TeX
world), but for sure it isn't respected in texmf.cnf.  For reference,
the comment says:

% 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.

However, the comma is used througout in Master/texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf and
in the -4WIN variant.  A semicolon is also used at a couple of places,
most notably

SYSTEXMF = $TEXMFLOCAL;$TEXMFMAIN;$TEXMFDIST

and after the . component in each TEXINPUTS.foo variable, although the
comment doesn't say anything about `;' in the middle of a path, only

% A leading/trailing/doubled ; in the paths will be expanded into the
%   compile-time default. Probably not what you want.

Should the comments be adapted to reality, or should we try to change
reality? 

Regards, Frank

-- 
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)


More information about the tex-live mailing list