[tex-k] Problems for HOME with trailing "/"

[Karl Berry]

    Which you will, if you're root ... 

Unless ~root = /root ... possibly :).  Anyway, my point was just that
it's not the fact of $HOME having a trailing / by itself that causes the
slowness, but rather having a big directory tree to search.  (Not saying
this has anything to do with solving the problem.)

    Or perhaps HOME=/ will cause different behaviour already?

There are various attempts in the code to try to avoid home directory
expansion resulting in a double-slash, but obviously they are
insufficient, since this issue continues to recur on occasion.  I'll see
if I can hack up something better.

    Back in the days of Apollo computers, 

I worked (as little as I could) on Apollos once upon a time.  I hated
them!

    Don't get me started on embedded references to
    environment variables in filenames.

:).  The only related thing I ever saw was on DG-UX, where you could
have envvar references in symlink targets, as I recall (this is some 15
years ago).  I thought it was kind of cool, but never really made use of
it, since of course it was completely unportable.

Thanks,
k