Re: Multi-tty design (Re: Reordering etc/NEWS)

[David Kastrup]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

>     The problem is that such loops are the _obvious_ thing for
>     manipulating process-environment.  So we need not only bother about
>     code inside of Emacs, but also in external packages.
>
> It surprises me that you want to look for more than one envvar at a
> time.

In this particular case, there are environment variables of the form
TEXINPUTS
TEXINPUTS.latex
TEXINPUTS.pdftex
TEXINPUTS.whatever

that are use by the various TeX executables, first the variable with
the program in its name, then the general variable as a fallback.  So
I need to change all of the variables with a certain pattern.

> If all the programs that do this will react well to using the null
> string, I guess we can use the null string.

"All" is probably an oversimplification.  However, programs should be
prepared to some degree to deal with non-trivial strings here (it is
possible to export shell functions, for example), so the absence of
the equals sign is probably something that will trip up quite fewer
programs than a non-string element would.

-- 
David Kastrup