R devel - Jan 2018 - configure: PATH not honoured when locating kpsewhich

Dear R-Developers,

I have just noticed that R configure picks up an older system kpsewhich
(and consequently fails) despite the correct kpsewhich being in the PATH as
it should. So "which kpsewhich" gives the correct one. I could work
around
this by setting KPSEWHICH=`which kpsewhich` on the configure command line.
Is there any reason the PATH is not being honoured? In many situations
users have no control over system installed packages (not being root) so I
would have thought that R configure should honour the build environment,
esp PATH.

With best regards,
David


observed behaviour (current R-3.4.3 release)

$ ./configure
...
leads to inconsolata.sty etc not being found because they're not in the
system TeX installation. According to the configure output, the
location /usr/bin/kpsewhich is being used.


$ ./configure KPSEWHICH=`which kpsewhich`
...
completes successfully.


expected behaviour:

$ ./configure
...
completes successfully.

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