Subject: Re: Installation hangs because asks for input from terminal (Attn: tetex maintainer, setup maintainer)
From: Jan Nieuwenhuizen <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 21:23:21 +0200

Igor Pechtchanski writes:

>> FWIW, the way teTeX works, most variables set in texmf.cnf are
>> overridden by the environment; it would be next to impossible to
>> guarantee a successful teTeX environment after logging in if variables
>> from the WINDOWS are allowed to silently enter the Cygwin
>> environment...
>
> Well, if you install teTeX with an empty environment, and then attempt to
> run it from a user shell (which *will* inherit the Windows settings),
> wouldn't it still be broken?

Yes, that's exactly what I meant: it makes little sense to make sure
that setup.exe does the right thing (it should not hang of course),
when after user login running latex still doesn't work.

> (Yes, you can play games with /etc/profile.d scripts, but that can only
> take you so far...)

Indeed, I don't want to go that way.

> Why not just unset offending variables for now?

Because I do not like to make the wrong fix.  In this case, it will
probably hurt very few people, so it would make sense to think a bit
and do it correctly, if possible.

See, I can easily add unsetting bunch of variables to post-texmf.mf, eg

   unset MFINPUTS TEXINPUTS TEXMF TEXMFCNF TFMFONTS VARTEXFONTS

but it makes little sense unless I also do that in a profile.d script
(ugh).

Then, just pick a variable from texmf.cnf and set it to a silly value
in Windows, eg

   pool_size=2

and your tetex setup will be broken again.

Jan.

-- 
Jan Nieuwenhuizen <[email-masked]> | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
http://www.xs4all.nl/~jantien       | http://www.lilypond.org

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