Sun 20 Sep 2015 03:11:16 PM UTC, original submission:
The texi2dvi code before rev 6632 to set variable path_sep was as folows:
This code has an issue that it would set path_sep to ":" for djgpp,
which I understood incorrect.
The code was corrected as follows:
However, this cause texi2dvi to throw this error when launched from an MSYS console:
Eli's opinion was that trying to launch texi2dvi from an MSYS bash to
run a MinGw TeX is as follows:
-------
If you want to support MSYS, then it's a mess: MSYS converts ':' to
';' in PATH, but it doesn't do anything about other variables, like
TEXINPUTS. So if you have an MSYS Bash and MinGW TeX, you are screwed
anyway.
Based on that, I wouldn't recommend the Texinfo project to even try
supporting MSYS, since the probability of having MSYS TeX program on a
Windows machine is close to zero
-------
Well, on the second point (the probability of having MSYS TeX program
on a Windows machine is close to zero), I disagree, I realized
experimentally that MikTeX, which is one of the two majors TeX distros
on MSW, is actually an MSYS TeX program, it understands MSYS paths for
the input document source and for the TEXINPUTS and suchlikes.
On the first pint (So if you have an MSYS Bash and MinGW TeX, you are
screwed anyway), I agree that if the TEXINPUTS and suchlikes are non
empty and configured in MSW with the DOS conventions, e.g. like this:
set TEXINPUTS=C:\Way\To\Path1;C:\Way\To\Path2\\;
then, yes, this will screw up texi2dvi, because, as MSYS per se does
not do any conversion on these envvars, texi2dvi will mix up the DOS
convention and the MSYS convention for paths.
I think that to handle this case there are two things that need to be
made in MikTeX, not in Texinfo:
- recommend users not to use the TEXINPUTS and suchlikes variables
(let them empty), and use rather the MikTeX root configurator
- recommand users that if however they will use the the TEXINPUTS and
suchlikes variables, then they should either:
- configure them in MSYS format --- which may be problematic if
there are other non-MSYS TeX installed on the same machine, or
- source in their MSYS ~/.profile some MikTeX scripts that does that
conversion from DOS to MSYS. I attached that sort of script to
this bug report.
Concerning texi2dvi I recommend to have the same handling for Msys as
for cygwin, under the assumption that when you call the script the TeX
envvars are in Msys format (either they are empty, or the user has
configured them in Msys format, or the conversion script was called before)
I atached a texi2dvi patch to do that.
|