Re: [AUCTeX-devel] Fix about usage of kpsewhich

[David Kastrup]

Ikumi Keita <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi Mosè and all,
>
>>>>>> Mosè Giordano <address@hidden> writes:
>> sorry for the late reply, these days I'm getting all @gnu.org emails
>> with huge delay.
>
> It seems that the delivery system of GNU mail list suffers severe
> trouble these days.  No mails since Nov 30 are listed on
> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/auctex/
> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/auctex-devel/
> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-auctex/
> at the time of writing this message.
>
>> 2017-12-01 23:34 GMT+01:00 David Kastrup <address@hidden>:
>>>> Braces + comma should be fine.
>>> 
>>> Unless there are directories containing comma itself in the PATH.  Is
>>> that an allowed character in Windows file systems?
>
>> It's allowed in NTFS, according to Wikipedia[1]:
>
>>     In Win32 namespace: any UTF-16 code unit (case-insensitive) except
>>     /\:*"?<>| as well as NUL
>
> Actually, the code in question is used regardless of the platform, so
> the file systems involved are not limited to NTFS.
>
> I just thought of another approach using brace expansion.  We can obtain
> the right path delimiter by just taking the second character of the
> output of "kpsewhich --expand-path {.,..}".

Presumably

    kpsewhich --expand-path "{.,..}"

That's really clever.  Yes, it should do the trick, assuming the Windows
executable doesn't try to be helpful by inserting the current directory,
and "foreign" implementations of kpsewhich (like the MikTeX one) behave
accordingly.

> It would be robust since it would work on any platform and not be
> interfered with directory names with literal comma.

Indeed.

-- 
David Kastrup