Bug#291372: Change home texmf dir to ~/.texmf

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Paul van Tilburg <paulvt@debian.org> schrieb:

> Package: tetex-base
> Version: 2.0.2c-3
> Severity: wishlist
>
>
> Hi,
>
> More of a question than a bugreport.  Would it be possible changing the
> default user-specific texmf dir to ~/.texmf instead of ~/texmf to prevent
> (as I percieve it) cluttering of the homedirs?  IMO it is a more sane
> default.

I'm not sure that this would be better. To me, the dot-directories in
$HOME are for user-specific configuration, while a HOMETEXMF contains
much more than this. In fact, mine doesn't contain any file that we
moved from /usr/share/texmf to /etc/texmf. Instead, I have self-made
packages, some wrapper packages for buggy ones, or things I previously
had in many of my preambles. I even have _data_ there:
~/texmf/bibtex/bib. 

Therefore ~/.texmf doesn't seem adequate to me. However, if you really
want it for user-specific configuration, there's good news for you, from
05TeXMF.cnf in tetex-bin_2.99.9.20050111-beta:

,----
| % TEXMFCONFIG, where texconfig stores configuration data.
| % With teTeX-3.0 or later, this must be set.
| % For using a separate tree:
| %   TEXMFCONFIG = /usr/share/texmf-config
| % For sharing this tree with $TEXMFMAIN:
| TEXMFCONFIG = $TEXMFMAIN
| % In Debian, TEXMFCONFIG should usually not be changed from being
| % the same as $TEXMFMAIN by the local administrator. However, users
| % can set e.g. 
| % TEXMFCONFIG = $HOME/.texmf-config
| % in their shell environment, and use the texconfig program to create
| % their own configuration variations, including own formats.
`----

> Problem is though, that some users might have a ~/texmf already (while I
> changed it to ~/.texmf on every machine) and swiching will lead to some
> problems.  This can be solved by introducing an OLDHOMETEXMF (in
> /etc/texmf/texmf.d/05TeXMF.cnf) and paving the way for a conversion.

Uhm, I wouldn't like to clutter TEXMF even more. In the current beta, we
have 

TEXMF = {!!$TEXMFCONFIG,$TEXMFHOME,!!$TEXMFVAR,!!$TEXMFLOCAL,!!$TEXMFOLDLOCAL,!!$TEXMFMAIN}

and we will probably soon add TEXMFSITE (analogous to site-lisp or to
site-python).

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer