mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[David Allouche <address@hidden>]

On Mon, Jun 02, 2003 at 08:57:42AM +0200, Martin Costabel wrote:
> 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.

Locate... yuck!


> 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 any case, I'd like if you can produce something which might be
accepted in the distribution.

I was recently out to fix the problems the insane guile-config hack is
causing. Somehow, Joris feels compelled to use this kind of ugliness
so I had to find a way to disable this optionnaly.

I made the undesirable behaviour (guessing of the location of guile
using various dirty tricks including using guile-config) optional on
an environment variable (TEXMACS_GUESS_GUILE). This is useful to help
user debugging their texmacs weirdnesses. The default behaviour (when
this variable is not set to a meaningful value) is set by the
--enable-guile-guessing configuration option, which defaults to "yes".
This is useful to people who have a requirement not to use this insane
hack (like packagers and people using guile-1.6.4).

The end result is that the default behaviour is not modified (which
pleases texmacs maintainer) but there are effective ways to disable
the hack and even to re-enable it at runtime in case that could be of
use.

Hopefully, that modification will be merged for the next release.

Check the patch manager for how I did this:
https://savannah.gnu.org/patch/index.php?func=detailpatch&patch_id=1564&group_id=156

-- 
                                                            -- ddaa