[tex-live] path separator - deprecated or not

Hans Hagen pragma at wxs.nl
Sat May 15 17:22:27 CEST 2004


Hi Olaf,

While cleaning up some files i found this mentioned in a texmf.cnf on my 
system

% You can use brace notation, for example: /usr/local/{mytex:othertex}
% expands to /usr/local/mytex:/usr/local/othertex.  Instead of the path
% separator you can use a comma: /usr/local/{mytex,othertex} also expands
% to /usr/local/mytex:/usr/local/othertex.  However, the use of the comma
% instead of the path separator is deprecated.
%
% The text above assumes thet path separator is a colon (:).  Non-UNIX
% systems use different path separators, like the semicolon (;).

Is this 'deprecated' still valid? If so, doesn't that make the config file 
system dependent and non portable? Since i see that the , is still used, i 
think that instead the platform dependent seperators in specs are 
deprecated (: as well as ;) in favor or a ,

actually, i got the impression that : and ; and , are all accepted as 
separators, so maybe 'deprecated' no longer is valid; the colon is 
dangerous since it can be a drive or other specs as well and if the new 
library supports url's as well ... maybe something different is needed then 
(although i think that the , is not used in any file spec on any system 
unless you use basenames with ,'s)

Hans


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