[tex-live] pdftex problem with current p4 depot texconfig

[Thomas Esser]

> >It is, if you call it correctly:
> >  kpsewhich --format='pdftex config' pdftex.cfg
> 
> strange, not in my version, did fabrice include that in fptex?

I don't know. I am only speaking about the current source.development
(and the same is in my teTeX sources which are still unpublished).

> >Anyway, kpsewhich now (after my latest change) knows how to handle
> >pdftex.cfg even without
> >  --format='pdftex config'
> 
> Just curious, is this a generic feature, i.e. 'any program config' ?

No, kpathsea supports a fixed list of search path and each can be
used by kpsewhich. The source is in tex-file.c:

    #define PDFTEXCONFIG_ENVS "PDFTEXCONFIG"
    ...
        case kpse_pdftex_config_format:
          INIT_FORMAT ("pdftex config", DEFAULT_PDFTEXCONFIG, PDFTEXCONFIG_ENVS);
          break;
    ...

and in tex-file.h:

    typedef enum
    {
      kpse_gf_format,
      kpse_pk_format,
    ...
      kpse_pdftex_config_format,
      kpse_last_format /* one past last index */
    } kpse_file_format_type;

and texmf.in:

    PDFTEXCONFIG = .;$TEXMF/pdftex/{$progname,}//

The string given as first argument to INIT_FORMAT can be used at the
commandline of kpsewhich to select the format. One needs to do this
if kpsewhich cannot guess the search path on its own. Usually, it
does this guess based on the file extension and this works fine
for most search formats. E.g. vf / tfm are always guessed correctly.

Config files are a problem, because many programs have them and there
is no clear namespace by extension. There are even tex input files
named .cfg, so we cannot "register" the .cfg extension to any of
these programs (like pdftex which has pdftex.cfg).

To make kpsewhich more user-friendly, it has a hard-weired guess for
some file names. This list used to include e.g. psfonts.map, but this
exception could be removed which the new restructuring for map files.
Yesterday, I have added a special case for pdftex.cfg, so people
can now say
  kpsewhich pdftex.cfg

In all my scripts, I don't rely on any guess of kpsewhich. I explicitly
select the search path.

Thomas