[tex-live] [tlpmgui] tlpmgui starts in the wrong mode under Win32

[George N. White III]

On 2/1/07, Dirk Ullrich <dirk.ullrich at googlemail.com> wrote:

> Nobody expects that tlpmgui guesses what TeX I already have on my box.
> That is the reason why I would like to have a mechanism to _manually_
> overwrite tlpmgui's guessing.

Some do expect exactly that.  Since the locations of texmf trees are
tied to the location of
the executable it is natural to use that as the basis for locating any
existing trees.  Still, it is best to avoid surprises for people
installing TL -- especially for those of us who hope that TL will be
seen as a worthy successor to tetex.

Many cases of unexpected behaviour turn out to be due to some old,
forgotten, binary found in a user's path.  This is as much of a
problem on linux/unix/OS X as for Windows.  Some systems do have tools
(which, whence) that can help pin down the locations of binaries, and
I have seen perl scripts that walk the list of directories in the path
checking each directory.

It would be useful to have a texconfig option to check for multiple
version of key programs in a PATH as well as a windows port.  It would
certainly help if people can provide the output from "texconfig
confall" in bug reports.  Maybe tlpmgui can add configuration summary
section similar to "texconfig confall" that will be displayed if an
existing tex is found so the user can see what they have and decide
whether to continue or to hide or remove existing tex installs.

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia