[tex-k] kpsewhich listing environment variables

[Karl Berry]

Olaf -- what would you think of extending the output of kpsewhich --help
to show the list of environment variables searched for?  This seems like
it should be straightforward.  It's not perfect, but it would help the
cases below.

Not sure if you already saw all this on the pdftex list ...

Best,
karl


Date: Wed, 07 Sep 2005 09:45:14 -0400
From: Geoffrey Alan Washburn <geoffw at cis.upenn.edu>
To: Karl Berry <karl at freefriends.org>
CC: frank at kuesterei.ch, pdftex at tug.org
Subject: Re: [pdftex] kpathsea environment variables

[...]

There are a couple things I am working on where this comes up. 

The first is a tool I maintain for generating shell scripts that manage 
a user's environment.  If a configuration file says to extend 
environment variable FOO, it will output the appropriate to do so 
(export FOO=bar or whatnot).  However, if FOO is a kpathsea environment 
variable, the tool should make sure that it includes the empty extension 
(export FOO=:bar) to make sure that the default search path isn't lost.  
The question is how should this tool decide what is a kpathsea variable 
and what is not?  Right now it is hardcoded, and there is a mechanism 
that authors of configuration files can declare a variable as a kpathsea 
variable. 

The second is a replacement for make that I use/work with, omake.  It is 
sufficiently programmable that it provides as part of its standard 
library a function for building a LaTeX document from a specified source 
file (calculating the appropriate dependencies along the way).   This 
function, as currently written, knows to take the omake arrays TEXINPUTS 
and BIBINPUTS and convert them environment variables before invoking 
latex.  However, it doesn't know about BIBINPUTS, T1FONTS, etc. The 
developers think that hardcoding all kpathsea environment variables 
isn't a viable solution, so it would be better if it they could instead 
query kpathsea to find out which language level arrays should be 
interpreted as kpathsea environment variables.

-- 
[Geoff Washburn|geoffw at cis.upenn.edu|http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~geoffw/]