[tex-live] Pathological search path for TeXMF.cnf

[Mojca Miklavec]

Hi,

Just a single answer.

On Sat, Mar 14, 2015 at 9:27 AM, Philip Taylor wrote:
>
> 2) What are the references to (e.g.,)
> "D:/TeX/Live/2014/bin/win32/share/texmf-local/web2c" ?  There /is/ no
> "share" directory under /Bin/Win32.

I don't particularly like "share" being added by default either.
Package managers like Debian/Fedora/SuSE/*BSD/MacPorts/HomeBrew/...
can change that path at build time. And for TeX Live as distributed on
DVD/online there is/should be no need to look into "share". But I
didn't ever experience any serious performance issues, so I never
complained. I agree that the path is somewhat weird though.

> 3) Why does TEXMFCNF reference a hard-wired "texmf-local" (e.g.,)
> "D:/TeX/Live/2014/texmf-local/web2c" ?  I have no such directory -- my
> TEXMFLOCAL is \TeX\Live\TeXMF\Local, declared as such at installation time.

This is partially a chicken-and-egg problem. If you define TEXMFLOCAL
to be \TeX\Live\TeXMF\Local at installation time (rather than
compilation time), there is no way for kpathsea to know where your
TEXMFLOCAL/web2c/texmf.cnf is until it actually reads at least one
texmf.cnf file. That path was probably added there to fit the default
installation scheme.

Mojca