Installing TDS at Sussex

[K. Berry]

    alan> But that requires having the dvi drivers search all of
    TEXINPUTS for figures, rather than a (much smaller) images directory.

The whole thesis of the TDS is that searches are cheap. If this is not
true, things are hopeless anyway. What good does it do for the DVI
driver to search a small directory if TeX has to search a big one anyway?

Since TeX has to find the image files to get the bounding boxes, I
think they should be under tex//. I don't see the advantage to breaking
them out.

    one solution is for implementors to make it easy to say that
     $TEXMF/tex/latex//
    means
     {/usr/local/tex,/usr/home/alan/tex}/tex/latex/latex

    as it were, so that maintaining a local tree is not too much trouble

    maybe someone can see how to express this in kpathsea? can it be done?

You'd have to duplicate all the paths with two different TEXMF's.

There've been some discussions of directly supporting multiple trees,
but I have yet to be convinced it's worthwhile.

Anyway, regardless of whatever I do or do not implement, it seems a moot
point, since certainly the many other implementors out there will be
uninterested in something so hairy -- after all, simple caching
strategies were voted down, and significant compromises made because of
that, as we all know. Multiple TEXMF's is a lot more painful than
caching, believe me.

Are there any real local installations out there with two complete texmf
trees?

    carlisle> I think the idea of `registering' every such name is a
    non-starter. 

I agree. I don't see the win here, Sebastian. Explain?