[tex-live] textlive seems to ignore top of home tree

[Victor Ivrii]

On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 11:55 AM, Philip Taylor (Webmaster, Ret'd)
<P.Taylor at rhul.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>
> Robin Fairbairns wrote:
>
>> what is surely *not* a matter of opinion is
>> that you are rattling on about a matter of no interest to anyone else,
>> in the absence of an offer to code anything.
>
> If your statement is true, Robin (and I sincerely hope
> that it is not), then that is a sad reflection on the
> TeX Live project.  What Virgil is trying to do is to make
> life simpler for the first-time user of TeX Live : we both
> know that learning TeX itself is non-trivial, so to expect
> a first-time user of TeX Live to also familiarise himself
> with the requirements of the TeX Directory Structure is
> (IMHO) not very realistic.  Virgil is proposing that
> such a user should be able to place a small number of
> private files in the root of his/her TEXMFHOME directory,
> and that TeX Live should be able to find them there.
> It is not at all clear to me why the received opinion
> is that this would cause a massive performance hit.
> Virgil is not (as far as I can tell) suggesting that TeX
> should search the entire TEXMFHOME tree before looking elsewhere --
> rather that TeX should look first in TEXMFHOME itself
> (presumably after looking in the current working directory)
> and then continue to use its normal search mechanism.

The problem with this suggestion is that it facilitates a creation (in
the not so distant future) by such user of the bloody mess which
he/she later will ask to help to clean someone else and this someone
else will say a lot of nice well deserved four letter words in English
(or longer in other languages) about poor moron who created this mess
and those who made it possible.

Victor


>
> ** Phil.
>



-- 
========================
Victor Ivrii, Professor, Department of Mathematics, University of Toronto
http://www.math.toronto.edu/ivrii