On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 11:55 AM, Thomas A. Schmitz
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.
TeX Live 2008 has TEXMFHOME set to $HOME/texmf in the default configuration file (configured so ls-R is not needed).
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.
Having TEXINPUTS set when TeX is not installed is not nice, but it is
really a trivial issue. Someone who uses SuSE should post a note
explaining how to remove TEXINPUTS (hopefully in a way that will
survive updates) and file a bug report with SuSE. Distributions are
can only be as "TeX friendly" as their users -- otherwise you get
what is needed to build program documents and no more.
--
George N. White III