Re: environment variable configuration and documentation

Vincent Belaïche wrote:
> If I do the same experiment with additionally the --tidy option to
> texi2pdf, the TEXINPUTS is set to :
> 
> 
> /c/Programmes/installation/texinfo-
> install/trunk/util/dummy.t2d/pdf/bak:/c/Programmes/installation/texinfo-
> install/trunk/util:/c/Programmes/installation/texinfo-
> install/trunk/util/.:
> 
> 
> ie same as before, and the command run is the following:
> 
> 
> pdfetex -recorder '\catcode126=12 \def\normaltilde{~}\catcode126=13
> \let~\normaltilde ' '\input' '/c/Programmes/installation/texinfo-
> install/trunk/util/./dummy.texi'
> 
> 
> In this second case the input document file path is clearly an MSYS path,
> not an MSW path. And the compilation works fine all the same.
> 
> 
> So, I don't know how MikTeX achieves that internally, but for sure
> somewhere you are calling some MSYS Library (msys-1.0.dll ?) to do that
> conversion. I noticed that it works even with MSYS paths that are mounted
> in my ~/etc/fstab

It is not MiKTeX which does this conversion, but MSYS bash (or more specifically, the MSYS runtime which Bash is compiled against), see http://www.mingw.org/wiki/Posix_path_conversion 

My MiKTeX 2.9 installation hasn't been updated in a while, but I believe the MiKTeX texi2* files are not wrappers, but programs implementing the same functionality (i.e. they are not thin wrappers around shell scripts).

MSYS also does the same with the environment variables. I demonstrate this in a quick-and-dirty way on my computer using the MSYS2 Bash prompt provided by Git-Bash in Git-for-Windows and the mingw64 C compilers provided by Cygwin:

display.c
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main (int argc, char *argv[])
{
  printf("Supplied argument: %s\nTEXINPUTS: %s\n", argv[1], getenv("TEXINPUTS"));

  return 0;
}

Compile this using i686-w64-mingw64-gcc -o display.exe display.c

** Please note that display.exe is a native executable depending on neither cygwin1.dll nor msys-*.dll, just like MiKTeX's executables **

Then from an MSYS bash prompt with display.exe in the current directory I run:

Altus+DRA@Altus MINGW64 /c/Scratch
$ export TEXINPUTS=/c/Windows:/c/Windows/system32

Altus+DRA@Altus MINGW64 /c/Scratch
$ ./display.exe /c/Windows
Supplied argument: C:/Windows
TEXINPUTS: C:\Windows;C:\Windows\system32

And you can see that the supplied program (which in your case would be MiKTeX's entirely non-MSYS pdfetex.exe) is supplied with both a converted argument and a converted environment variable.


David

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
Q: How can I leave the mailing list?
A: See http://docs.miktex.org/faq/support.html#leavingml