Bug#607351: texlive-binaries: texdoc aliasing sometimes doesn't work

[Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard <mpg@elzevir.fr>]

Hi Frank,

Le 20/05/2011 15:19, Frank Küster a écrit :
> Manuel, why does texdoc look for texdoc.cnf in particular directories?
> Why doesn't it just do a kpathsea lookup for texdoc.cnf, thus looking in
> all TEXMF trees defined on the site for the user running texdoc?
> 
Besides the reason you mention, there are two more:
- I like to be able to display a list of possible configuration files with
texdoc -f to avoid lengthy explanations about where to put/search the config files.
- currently there are special configuration files like texdoc-linux.cnf on
linux, etc. However, I'm not sure if anyone is using them at all and it would
probably be better to suppress them.

So there is actually only one reason.

> Hm, one explanation might be that there doesn't seem to be a way to get
> kpathsea find texdoc.cnf at the places where it currently is.  But that
> could be fixed.  I think the problem might become more general, and
> maybe kpathsea should be changed to look for config files for script at
> a particular place.  TEXMF/config or TEXMF/scripts/config comes to
> mind.  In order to find the right file below that directory,  a script
> would declare its name as the "engine" and the configuration files could
> be sorted as the scripts are now.
> 
Actually, I think I don't even need a new kpathsea search PATH, I can directly
consult the value of $TEXMF and then just append texdoc/texdoc.cnf. This would
be compatible with the current locations and would also find configuration files
in TEXMFDIST or TEXMFSYSCONFIG for example, which, IIUC, would solve your problem.

I'll probably be able to modify the -f option so that it is still helpful to a
clueless (regarding texmf trees and kpsewhich) user.

The only point is, in TeX Live the order of the trees is:

TEXMFMAIN
TEXMFLOCAL
TEXMFDIST

so TEXMFMAIN and TEXMFLOCAL would be reversed comparing to the current
situation. Maybe I should ship the default configuration file in TEXMFDIST then.

> What do you think?
> 
In general, sounds like a good idea, but I need to think about it a bit more.

Manuel.