texi2dvi bug when $TEX et al. are absolute paths

[Per Mildner]

The texi2dvi --help says (as of "texi2dvi 5704 2014-07-07 17:45:16Z karl"):

> The values of the BIBER, BIBTEX, DVIPDF, DVIPS, HEVEA, LATEX, MAKEINDEX,
> MAKEINFO, PDFLATEX, PDFTEX, SED, T4HT, TEX, TEX4HT, TEXINDEX, and THUMBPDF_CMD
> environment variables are used to run those commands, if they are set.

But this is not true, at all. Setting TEX to the absolute path of the tex 
executable will cause texi2dvi to fail.

The reason for the failure is that the values of these environment variables 
are passed to the "findprog" function which "Return true if PROG is somewhere 
in PATH, else false.", i.e. it looks in $PATH _only_.

This makes the environment variables completely useless, except in the cases 
where the executables are on PATH but have non-default base name, which seems 
like an unlikely scenario.

Regards,


Per Mildner                                     address@hidden
Swedish Institute of Computer Science