Bug#396835: Wishlist for kpathsea: Remove trailing slash from $HOME

[Frank Küster <frank@kuesterei.ch>]

Olaf Weber <olaf@infovore.xs4all.nl> wrote:

> Frank Küster writes:
>
> [tale of woe deleted]
>
>> Anyway, it might be an idea to remove any trailing slashes from
>> directory variables inherited from the environment, like HOME.  It won't
>> hurt anywhere, and make it a bit more, well, "fool"proof.
>
>> What do you think?
>
> In the current sources this seems to be partially done, in that tilde
> expansion will handle this in almost all cases.  Other environment
> variables are not so protected.  A complication is that variables like
> TEXINPUTS could legitimately be set to end with //.

Hm, this is supposed to already work in teTeX-3.0 and TeXlive 2005.
However, the texmf.cnf files in both do not use the tilde, but $HOME.

If I do

export HOME=/home/frank/

then kpsewhich --expand-var='$TEXMFHOME' takes ages and scans the
complete home dir; if I replace "$HOME" by "~" in texmf.cnf, it is fast
again.  However, a kpsewhich search for a file still takes long and
looks everywhere (hash_lookup) below $HOME.

All in all, it seems as if

- tilde expansion is never used in the standard setup, and

- removal of double slashes only works partially.

These tests were done with teTeX 3.0 (Web2C 7.5.4).

Regards, Frank

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