Re: system command

[John W. Eaton]

On 17-May-2001, I wrote:

| OK, here is what is happening.  Octave and teTeX both use the
| kpathsearch library, and that library has some TeX-specific things in
| it.  One thing it does is add some variables to the environment when
| it is initialized.  So when Octave starts, it adds values for the
| following variables
| 
|   SELFAUTOLOC
|   SELFAUTODIR
|   SELFAUTOPARENT
|   TEXMFDBS
| 
| that are not appropriate for TeX.

Oops.  This is not quite correct.  Kpathsearch adds the first three,
but Octave actually adds the last one (in initialize_pathsearch in
src/octave.cc) so that the kpathsearch library can find Octave's ls-R
database(s).

Hmm.  I think the only good solution is to fix the kpathsearch library
so that it can be initialized without doing TeX-specific stuff, and to
not rely only on environment variables to get this kind of
information.

jwe



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