[1360] in SIPB bug reports
Re: new xdvi.new installed; please test!
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Theodore Ts'o)
Fri Oct 19 13:47:55 1990
Date: Fri, 19 Oct 90 13:47:23 -0400
From: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
To: "Jonathan I. Kamens" <jik@pit-manager.MIT.EDU>
Cc: bug-sipb@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Jonathan I. Kamens's message of Thu, 18 Oct 90 21:00:41 -0400,
Reply-To: tytso@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
There is one fairly serious problem with xdvi.new, which is a
user-interface issue. The problem is that the old xdv, tex, and latex
all use the environment variable TEXFONTS to determine where to find the
font files. xdvi.new uses the environment variable XDVIFONTS, and it is
definitely a more powerful way of finding your font files. However, it
isn't the same as the old way and it will screw a lot of users who are
using /mit/texfonts or who have their own private tex font cache for
whatever reason.
I believe I've mentioned this one before, and I thought you were going
to refer it back to the authors. Did they ever respond to this problem?
My suggestion for a fix is to change the program so that if XDVIFONTS
doesn't exist, to make it fall back to reading the TEXFONTS environment
variable. xdvi.new's syntax for XDVIFONTS is upwards compatible with
TEXFONTS, so it should be a very simple change.
- Ted
