Re: [AUCTeX] 11.90.2.2017-07-25; TeX-search-files-by-type: No TeX trees available; configure ‘TeX-tree-roots’ error

[Ikumi Keita]

Hi Sivaram, thank you for your reply.

>>>>> Sivaram Neelakantan <address@hidden> writes:
>> 1. Have you been experiencing that problem since long before?  Or did
>> that begin to occur recently?

> Recently.  I use the elpa package system to install and so far had no
> problems. 

>> 2. What are the values of `TeX-kpathsea-path-delimiter',
>> `TeX-tree-roots', `path-separator' and `system-type' in the buffer
>> where the error occurs?

> TeX-kpathsea-path-delimiter is :
> TeX-tree-roots is nil
> path-separator is ;
> system-type is 'windows-nt'

>> 3. On cygwin terminal, what does the command
>> kpsewhich --expand-path='$TEXMF'
>> output?

> /usr/share/texmf-site:/etc/texmf:/var/lib/texmf:/usr/share/texmf-dist

OK, I see that the primary reason of the error is the incompatibility
between colon and semicolon.

According to the lines
> Emacs  : GNU Emacs 25.3.1 (x86_64-w64-mingw32)
>  of 2017-09-17
and
> system-type is 'windows-nt'
, you are using Emacs built as native w32 application, so Emacs and
AUCTeX think that the path separator is semicolon ";" (w32 style).

To the contrary, the TeX distribution you are using is cygwin
application, which separates the path with colon ":" (unix style)
according to these lines:
> And (executable-find "kpsewhich") is "c:/cygwin/bin/kpsewhich.exe"

>> 3. On cygwin terminal, what does the command
>> kpsewhich --expand-path='$TEXMF'
>> output?
> /usr/share/texmf-site:/etc/texmf:/var/lib/texmf:/usr/share/texmf-dist

I suppose you used MikTeX previously since you wrote in
> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/auctex/2011-05/msg00002.html
that (executable-find "kpsewhich") returns
"c:/MiKTeX2.9/miktex/bin/kpsewhich.exe".  That kpsewhich doesn't use
colon ":" as the path separator, which cooperated with Emacs well in
those days.

Now I realized that AUCTeX has to be extremely careful when choosing the
path separator if it works on w32 platform.  It involves two factors:
Is Emacs w32 native application or cygwin application?
Is kpsewhich w32 native application or cygwin application?

I will elaborate the method to determine the path separator in AUCTeX.
Please wait for a while.

Regards,
Ikumi Keita