[tex-live] bibtex8
Gerben Wierda
Gerben.Wierda at rna.nl
Thu Oct 9 11:44:28 CEST 2003
On Oct 9, 2003, at 8:24 AM, Fabrice Popineau wrote:
>> Not always. If there are files a.b and a.b.tex, then don't you want
>> tex to read a.b.tex? That's why I programmed it that way in the first
>
> Maybe I'm wrong but I think that over the time, many people tend to
> stay
> away from multiple dots in path names, much more than say spaces in
> path
> names ;-)
I suspect that multiple extensions are here to stay and in some areas
even on the rise. Spaces in file names are problematic in shell-type
environments and thus especially in those environments, it is more
likely that people will keep away from them.
Besides, there is a nice hierarchy when using extensions. E.g. a file
foo.tar.bz2 is a BZIP2 compresses TAR archive file.
> All in all, it is only a matter of deciding if you want extensions to
> be
> meaningful or not. If they are (as the use of .tex seems to imply)
> they
> should always be, ie even for a.b, that is you want to feed tex with
> the
> file 'a' of type 'b'. So multiple dots should be prohibited. Ok,
> that's
> only an interpretation.
>
> MacIntosh used to store the file type in the file itself and in
> this
> respect solved the problem.
They are moving away from this solution to file name extensions. E.g.
.app for applications etc. The more complex file types have been
replaced by file bundles (in fact directories that only look like files
when inspected through the GUI). E.g. .app is a directory structure,
not a file.
Hierarchy has the advantage here as well. A filoe type may be BZIP2
compressed file, but .tar.bz2 shows you what has been compressed.
Actually, my installer does not rely on extensions, but uses the unix
`file' command to try to find out what kind of files are in a package.
>> place, after years of horrible confusion about the rules. In
>> retrospect, the whole idea of adding default suffixes is probably not
>> the right thing to do.
>
> Olaf suggested to make them configurable, which would help.
>
>> Anyway, forget that, it doesn't matter now. What's matters is either
>> getting bibtex8 fixed or getting kpathsea fixed so it works again. Or
>> dropping bibtex8, as Hans suggested. I really don't care which,
>> myself, and I can't offer to do the programming :(.
>
> No opinion about it.
>
> --
> Fabrice
>
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