Workaround for kpathsea problem with carbon Emacs on OS X

[William McCallum]

For a long time I have been having a problem that when I invoke tex 
related programs from within carbon emacs (such as latex or xdvi, using 
auctex) they fail to find certain files. This seems always a result of 
a failure in kpathsea, the file-searching program used by my 
implementation of TeX. I do not have the same problem when I use Emacs 
under X, called from the command line. So it seems that carbon emacs 
fails to pass on some key environment variable to kpathsea (I was never 
able to figure out which ... I did try putting various different 
settings in ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist).

I just discovered that if I call carbon Emacs from the command line 
(i.e., type in /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs at the 
command prompt), rather than starting the application in the usual way, 
then the problems go away in carbon emacs as well. I am happy to have 
discovered this work-around, but it would be nice to have a way of 
having the application itself properly inherit all the environment 
variables of the user who opens it.

I am using emacs 21.3.50, from cvs a couple of weeks ago.

Regards,
                Bill McCallum

(520) 621 6697
http://www.math.arizona.edu/~wmc