Auctex pkg: summary and state of art

[Reiner Steib]

On Tue, Sep 07 2004, Uwe Brauer wrote:

> Ok, ok, but how shall I use it for the variable in question? That is
> what shall I do with 
>
> (defcustom TeX-macro-global '
>
> Is what Stephen said correct? 

Stephen surely is right that configure's way of finding the value is
based on kpsewhich (unless you specify "--with-tex-input-dirs=DIRS").
If you follow Stephen's suggestion, you (or someone else) will have to
implement the lines I cited in Lisp (using `call-process' or similar).
Of course it is possible, but it probably won't look nice.  Also it
will fail on TeX distributions that are not based on the Kpathsea
library (MikTeX?).

Maybe it is enough to use '("/usr/local/lib/texmf/tex/") (as it was in
the Sumo version of 11.13) and tell the admin/user to set it to a more
appropriate value.

If the value is not correct (i.e. if the TeX directories are missing)
_and_ Kpathsea is not available or disabled (see the variable
`TeX-kpathsea-path-delimiter') the user will not get the nice
completion when using some commands (see below), but AUCTeX will
basically work nevertheless.

Some examples where `TeX-macro-global' is used:

(1) File name completion (if Kpathsea is not available or disabled):

    C-c C-m \input RET TAB
    C-c C-m \usepackage RET TAB
    C-c C-m \includegraphics RET RET TAB

    AFAICS, the availability of Kpathsea is detected automatically.
    If Kpathsea is available, `TeX-macro-global' isn't used.  But I
    didn't check it carefully, so there might be other AUCTeX
    functions that rely on `TeX-macro-global'.

(2) M-x TeX-auto-generate-global RET won't find the LaTeX files and thus
    the resulting files (in auto/) are incomplete.

> I can comment out this variable?

No, I don't think this is okay.  The variable would be undefined in
this case.  Better set it to some more or less reasonable default such
as '("/usr/local/lib/texmf/tex/").

Bye, Reiner.
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