Setting Tex and metapost paths without env variables
Hi people,
I'm packaging therion, some cave survey software, at the moment. In fact
I've packaged it but I have a couple of queries.
Therion uses tex and metafont extensively (to draw postscript/PDF cave
surveys/symbols). It need to set a couple of environment variables in order
to add it's own tex and metafont macros to the search paths of those apps.
ie
export THERION=/usr/share/therion
export MPINPUTS=.:/usr/share/therion/mpost:
export TEXINPUTS=.:/usr/share/therion/tex:
In order to initially package it I have done as suggested in the developers
reference and renamed the therion binary to therion.bin and made 'therion'
a shell script that sets these variables (or uses existing settings if
present), exports them and then runs therion.bin.
However this seems like something of a hack, and is not exactly encouraged
as a practice in the docs, so I wonder if it would be 'better' if therion
were to add it's macros to the Tex and metapost paths properly. Is there a
nice Debian way to do this (I know very little about either of these
programs)?
Or are there good reasons why things shouldn't be done this way. e.g you
really only want these extra dirs on the list when processing therion
stuff, not all the time as there might be clashes?, or perhaps it's
difficult to reliably register these paths and remove them when therion is
removed due to too many possible config flavours?
Suggestions welcome - if no-one has any better ideas I'll stick with
the current plan as it works fine - it just does seem very 'satisfying'.
Also - I have packages that now need building on unstable (right version
of gcc, right versions of wxwindows), but I don't have an unstable machine
handy. I assumed there would be handy chroots for maintainers to build in
if necessary but I couldn't actually find any except on dubussey.d.o. This
is OK, but I can't easily test the arm binaries produced in my normal test
environment.
There must be a 'recommended' way to do this building. Am I supposed to use
pbuilder or dchroot and make my own local unstable? How much space does
that need - the root disk is bursting on my development machine.
thanx for any help anyone can provide. Do cc: me - I'm not on this list.
Wookey
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work: http://www.aleph1.co.uk/ play: http://www.chaos.org.uk/~wookey/
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