[tex-live] LaTeX takes ages to complete.

[Karl Berry]

    some settings that are only interpreted properly when using TeXlive
    2008.  Brace expansion could possibly be among those.

For the record, brace expansion has been around in kpathsea for
15+ years.  

Basic tilde expansion has been around even longer, although I had to fix
some issues and implications this year for the sake of Windows, etc.,
now that we are actually using it in the default texmf.cnf.

k