On Thu, 20 Mar 1997, John F. Woods wrote:

> What would be really useful, though, would be an easy mechanism for
> applications to use to customize pathnames and even major functional
> choices.  MH has this to some degree; INN sort of provides it for INN

FWIW, check out kpathsea (k?'s path search library), which is a neat
hack for apps to find their support files based on their own location.
A good example of a system using it is the teTeX TeX/LaTeX distribution,
which is available precompiled (here we go again) for i386 on
ftp.netbsd.org, or in source which should build cleanly on all
platforms, at ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/archive/systems/unix/teTeX .

In short, teTeX provides all of the major and most of the minor
TeX/LaTeX related packages modified to use kpathsea, with the result
that the entire distribution more or less `just works' no matter where
you put it...

--
				Jim Wise
				jim.wise@turner.com