[tex-live] [FEATURE REQUEST] support for additional user texmf trees

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2012-02-23 at 10:58:43 +0100, Markus Kohm wrote:

 > Am Donnerstag, 23. Februar 2012 schrieb T T:
 > > I think that advanced users should be advanced enough to handle
 > > problems related to environment settings.
 > 
 > Moreover, we already have a lot of locations where texmf.cnfs may
 > reside. And in difference to most other files, kpathsea reads not
 > only the first of them, but every one that has been found by
 > kpathsea. I would not aim to increase this number of valid
 > texmf.cnf's locations, because it wouldn't make things easier, but
 > it may increase cost of file searching.

It's not the cost of file searching, it's not worse than adding a
\usepackage command to the preamble of a document.  texmf.cnf is a
system configuration file, not intended to be modified by users.

The variable TEXMFCNF is only needed in very rare cases as a last
resort.  In order to simply add additional search paths, it's better
to use TEXINPUTS.

  TEXINPUTS=~/testtexmf: pdftex foo

The colon at the end stands for all the other search paths set up in
texmf.cnf.  In other words, in the example above the directory
~/testtexmf is prepended to the standard search paths.

Regards,
  Reinhard

-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reinhard Kotucha                                      Phone: +49-511-3373112
Marschnerstr. 25
D-30167 Hannover                              mailto:reinhard.kotucha at web.de
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Microsoft isn't the answer. Microsoft is the question, and the answer is NO.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------