mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Martin Costabel <address@hidden>]

Martin Costabel wrote:

> This actually poses a bigger problem: The locate database has a tendency 
> to not be up to date, because in the best case it is updated once a day, 
> and on laptops typically it is never updated at all unless 
> locate.updatedb is started manually. Now since texmacs uses locate to 
> find all kinds of files, pixmaps, TeX font maps, and apparently also 
> documentation, it is inevitable that it will make mistakes.

After looking into this some more (I wish I hadn't!), it seems to me 
that the use of 'locate' is restricted to some truly evil hacks by which 
texmacs tries to find paths to the TeX and maxima installation.

I hope a more standard way to do this can be found. Or maybe for fink's 
texmacs I should patch init_texmacs.cc and init_first.cc to get rid of 
this stuff.

In the case of maxima, I see in the texmacs sources, in init_texmacs.cc, 
the following code

  string where= concretize (resolve_in_path ("maxima"));
  string s    = var_eval_system ("grep 'MAXIMA_DIRECTORY=' " * where);

But the only occurrence of MAXIMA_DIRECTORY in the maxima script is in 
the following interesting paragraph (I am not making this up!). From 
/sw/bin/maxima:

  # For some reason TeXmacs sets MAXIMA_DIRECTORY to the empty string,
  # which breaks maxima's internal path logic. This is a workaround.
  if [ -z "$MAXIMA_DIRECTORY" ]; then
    unset MAXIMA_DIRECTORY
  fi

This looks like a case of deep mutual misunderstanding.

--
Martin