Re: texconfig init

On Tuesday, Aug 31, 2004, at 07:12 America/Chicago, Thomas Esser wrote:

>> Are you saying that I shouldn't have the
>> '/usr/local/teTeX/bin/powerpc-apple-darwin-current' directory in my
>> PATH?
>
> No, Reinhard is talking about "." being an element of your $PATH. This
> is a problem if you cannot trust all users or all of the software on
> your system. Someone could place a trojan horse into /tmp and you might
> execute it if you "cd" into it. Even if "." is listed as last element,
> you can still be hit by a typo (such as "mroe" instead of "more").
>
OK, I was able to track down where that was added into my path and took
it out.  I originally made the modification after reading the 
discussion at

http://forums.osxfaq.com/viewtopic.php?t=3012

I can also see that in my early ignorance I have created a bit
of an unmanageable init sequence with too many files--IMO--calling 
source
from different places. That's another issue to start sifting out now 
that
my vision is clearing a bit after starting to interact with OS X through
the terminal rather than the OS X GUI.

> Back to your original problem: "\input texinfo" has read texinfo and
> not texinfo.tex. The reason was that for the first element of TEXINPUTS
> (which is "."), the system has tried to load texinfo.tex (which did not
> exist in ".") and then texinfo (which succeeded). The system has then
> stopped searching for texinfo.tex in other elements of your TEXINPUTS
> search path (which would have been successful).
>
> So, while the current rules for file searching can handle the situation
> that a program foo and it's documentation foo.tex both exist in
> "." (because foo.tex is always searched first), they have failed in 
> this
> case. On the other hand, any strategy which implements our "compiled
> oral history" will have cases where it is not doing what the user 
> wants...
>
> Thomas
>
Thanks for the feedback. I am now more confidently using ITRANS with 
teTeX.

/c