Re: Problem with kpsewhich on a new instal

    experimenting with one recipe or another takes hours.... 

For testing, you can use (for instance)
  install-tl --scheme scheme-infraonly
which installs only the tiny infrastructure programs (3M)
and use kpsewhich for testing.

Or --scheme scheme-minimal to get plain TeX.
Or --scheme scheme-basic   to get plain TeX and LaTeX.
Etc. (Sorry for the duplicated "scheme".)

    There is a small problem entering the tilda on the installer
    interface -- you have to type it twice.

Sounds like something about your terminal considers ~ to be an escape
character. Maybe you're using telnet or some such? I don't have to type
two ~ characters to get one to install-tl (or anywhere else).  Nothing
in the install-tl code knows anything special about two ~'s. It only
expands the first one.

    You cannot even run "kpsewhich --var-value TEXMFLOCAL".  It lloks like
    it is using arg[0] to locate itself 

Yes, it does use argv[0], because that's the only information available.

    But soon after you type it, it completed the whole like with the full path,

Yes, install-tl does expand ~ when it's used interactively, due to
previous user requests. Maybe it should be an option not to do so.

For the moment, it turns out you can keep the ~ in the various
TEX* directories by specifying it on the command line. I ran this:

install-tl --texdir="~/foo" --scheme scheme-infraonly

And it showed a literal ~ for TEXDIR, etc. It also completed the
installation into a new ~/foo directory and kpsewhich worked fine.

    It was suggested here to use $HOME, but the installer would not accept
    that. This time it tells you it is not accepting.

Yes, I put in that check after Boris (as I recall) reported problems. -k