Bug#358330: KPSE_DOT in fmtutil: Why set to `pwd`?

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Hi,

fmtutil has the following code:

  thisdir=`pwd`

  : ${KPSE_DOT=$thisdir}
  export KPSE_DOT

Can somebody explain to me the reason for this?  It turns out that it
grieves some users, because they get root without changing the
directory, and assume that as long as root's HOME directory is clean,
nothing bad should happen - but in fact configuration files, like
texmf.cnf, in the current directory are read.  Or tried to read, the
user who reported this as http://bugs.debian.org/358330 has an
nfs-mounted homedir in which root has no right to read files, and always
gets error messages:

/users/huron/danjean/texmf.cnf: Permission denied

This is just annoying, but might become a problem if random
configuration files are lying around (e.g. backups).  

And if it doesn't serve anything, why not drop it?  On todays system,
with TEXMFCONFIG and TEXMFSYSCONFIG and TEXMFLOCAL, I don't see why it
is necessary to have fmtutil read files in the current dir, let alone
fmtutil-sys. 

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX)