[tex-live] TeX Live 2008 testing - problems downloading

[Reinhard Kotucha]

Taco Hoekwater writes:
 > Taco Hoekwater wrote:
 > > 
 > > If $TEXMFVAR is known to be writeable (if present), you could do
 > 
 > I just realised I was not clear enough here. What I meant to say was:
 > 
 > If $TEXMFVAR is present *in the environment*, and the directory exists,
 > and it is writeable, you could ...
 > 
 > The reference to the environment is important because you cannot use 
 > texmf.cnf values in texmfcnf.lua, because context uses texmfcnf.lua
 > to *find* texmf.cnf (or more precisely, its preprocessed form) inside
 > the cache. The three $SELFAUTO... variables are available, though.


Hi,
TEXMFVAR is apparently the appropriate directory for auto-generated
stuff which a user don't really want to see.  However, setting
kpathsea variables in the environment is never a good solution.

If kpathsea is not avalable, I think that there are two possible
solutions:

  1. TEXMFCACHE=$TMP;$TEMP;$TMPDIR;/tmp

  2. TEXMFCACHE=$HOME/.luatex

The first approach should work on all platforms because, even if none
of the T* variables exist, there should be a directory '/tmp' on Unix
systems at least, and OS X is a Unix.  George recently said that /tmp
is not always writable.  But in this case the administrator *has* to
set these environment variables.  On Windows we can certainly assume
that $TEMP is always set.

The second approach should work as well, but on Windows files with a
leading dot in their name are not hidden.  On Windows one would put
such stuff into $APPDATA.  Though I think that it's doable using the
texlua functions os.type() or os.name(), the first approach is
certainly more straightforward.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha			              Phone: +49-511-3373112
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