Re: changing tetex render engine

> as the default render engine for tex.  I am having problems 
> with it in that it doesn't interpret environment variables 
> in the tex files.  The old engine(etex) interpreted them 

This was not caused by switching the engine. It was caused by an
implementation change in the kpathsea library. In the current sources
of kpathsea / web2c, this is already fixed.

Example (with teTeX-3.0):

    te@rodney:/tmp> cat ~/x.tex
    hi

    te@rodney:/tmp> /t/3.0/i/bin/i686-pc-linux-gnu/latex foo
    This is pdfeTeX, Version 3.141592-1.21a-2.2 (Web2C 7.5.4)
    entering extended mode
    (./foo.tex
    LaTeX2e <2003/12/01>
    Babel <v3.8d> and hyphenation patterns for american, french, german, ngerman, b
    ahasa, basque, bulgarian, catalan, croatian, czech, danish, dutch, esperanto, e
    stonian, finnish, greek, icelandic, irish, italian, latin, magyar, norsk, polis
    h, portuges, romanian, russian, serbian, slovak, slovene, spanish, swedish, tur
    kish, ukrainian, nohyphenation, loaded.
    (/space/gauss/TeX/3.0/i/share/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/minimal.cls
    Document Class: minimal 2001/05/25 Standard LaTeX minimal class
    ) (./foo.aux)

    ! LaTeX Error: File `$HOME/x.tex' not found.
    ...

Example (newer pdfetex, based on a newer kpathsea):

    te@rodney:/tmp> latex foo
    This is pdfeTeX, Version 3.141592-1.30.5-2.2 (Web2C 7.5.5)
    entering extended mode
    (./foo.tex
    LaTeX2e <2003/12/01>
    Babel <v3.8g> and hyphenation patterns for american, british, french, german, n
    german, bahasa, basque, bulgarian, catalan, croatian, czech, danish, dutch, esp
    eranto, estonian, finnish, greek, icelandic, irish, italian, latin, magyar, nor
    sk, polish, portuges, romanian, russian, serbian, slovak, slovene, spanish, swe
    dish, turkish, ukrainian, nohyphenation, loaded.
    (/software/oss/Text/teTeX-3.0/share/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/minimal.cls
    Document Class: minimal 2001/05/25 Standard LaTeX minimal class
    ) (./foo.aux) (/home/te/x.tex) [1] (./foo.aux) )
                   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
    Output written on foo.dvi (1 page, 200 bytes).
    Transcript written on foo.log.

The shell is not envolved in expanding these environment variables.

Thomas