On Sep 18, 2008, at 7:30 AM, Peter Münster wrote:
You're right, but I've to protect suse a bit: this was only an issue with a very new MKIV (new logic how to use TEXINPUTS), and suse could really not know about that. TEXINPUTS was quite useful, because every user could put his own personal directory in it, and there did not need to be an ls-R file.
Cheers, Peter
Well, no offense, I used to be a big fan of SuSE myself (still like it a lot, but their package manager really needs work). But: I just double-checked, and TEXINPUTS is still set on my 11.0 system - even though I don't have any SuSE-provided TeX-system installed. That's really unpardonable. I can understand why they want to set it for their own TeXLive packages, but not on a virgin system without any TeX component. For an inexperienced user who wants to install TeXLive from DVD or via the net installer, this will be a major obstacle. So I think the point remains valid: SuSE is not a TeX-friendly distribution. Thomas