[tex-live] texdoc: complain_about_old_envvar

Reinhard Kotucha reinhard.kotucha at web.de
Wed Aug 27 00:25:23 CEST 2008


Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard writes:
 >> I only get a small usage message.
 >> 
 > At the end of which you can read:
 > 
 > The command `texdoc texdoc' gives you the full user guide in pdf.
 > 
 > which is what I call pointing to the manual.

Hi Manuel,
I obviously called the old shell script instead of the texlua script.

Good that you confirmed that there is such a message, otherwise I
probably had not noticed that there is a pproblem at all.  But I
solved it now.

Look at this:

$ which texdoc
/home/reinhard/dev/texlive/svn/trunk/Master/bin/x86_64-linux/texdoc
$ ls -l bin/x86_64-linux/texdoc
lrwxrwxrwx 1 reinhard users 38 Aug 21 23:16 bin/x86_64-linux/texdoc -> ../../texmf/scripts/texlive/texdoc.tlu
$ texdoc --help
Usage: texdoc [OPTION]... [NAME]...
  Search for NAME in the TeX documentation and start a viewer.

  --help        show this help
  -v            verbose mode: show viewer command
  -l            just list all matching files. Do not start a viewer.
  -s            search the disk. remaining arguments will be passed
                as egrep patterns to filter the find output.
$

Quite confusing, or not?  Everything looks fine.  $PATH is set up
properly, as reported by 'which', and the symlink to the texlua file
is correct, too.  When I specified path/to/texdoc I got the texlua
version.  Can you explain what went wrong before reading the rest of
this message?  It's an interesting exercise, at least.

End of last week I ran 'svn up' and got an error message asking me to
run 'svn cleanup'.  But this didn't help.  Hence I renamed the old
working copy and checked out again.  I have some scripts which allow
me to switch between different versions of TeX Live.  They simply
start a new instance of Bash in a modified environment.

A full checkout takes some time and I obviously launched such a script
and invoked texdoc *after* I renamed the broken svn tree and *before*
texdoc had been checked out.  Then Bash found /usr/bin/texdoc, the
shell script provided by Gentoo.

Apparently I forgot that Bash remembers /paths/to/programs.  However,

$ hash      
hits    command
[...some lines ommitted...]
  13    /usr/bin/texdoc
$ hash -r
$ texdoc --help
[...output ommitted...]
$ hash
hits    command
   1    /home/reinhard/dev/texlive/svn/trunk/Master/bin/x86_64-linux/texdoc

solved the problem.  Sigh!  Invoking a new shell would have solved
this problem too, but the nasty part was to find out what actually
happened.

 > But it doesn't prevent people like you, obviously smart enough to
 > read a help message, to miss it :-)

Well, I'm unable to read things which don't appear on screen.  Now
everything works as expected and I can't resist to say that the usage
message provided by texdoc.tlu is excellent.

Sorry for the noise and thank you very much for your work.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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