modeless fonts

[K. Berry]

    For the font selection mechanism there is no particular reason even to
    make a <utility> subdirectory tree under modeless: all fonts are
    designed for that size, and that's that. In order to facilitate

Since gsftopk and ps2pk don't produce the same output, we must
distinguish them. Therefore, we need a <utility> directory.

    On the other hand, in the typical setup one will want to search one
    mode-dependent font pool, and *all* mode-independent ones. The
    "modeless" subdirectory tree warrants that.

Yes, that's the argument. To search all the mode-independent fonts, you
would currently have to specify all the utility names:
  $TEXMF/fonts/pk/{$MODE,gsftopk,ps2pk}//
[no, TDS doesn't allow/propose {foo,bar} syntax, but for purposes of
discussion...]

With modeless, the path spec simplifies and generalizes to:
  $TEXMF/fonts/pk/{$MODE,modeless}//

But the counter-argument is that with the introduction of modeless/, PK
files are at different levels in the tree, we've used up one more (the
last) directory level, and things are generally non-orthogonal.

    fonts/pk/CanonDX/metafont/dpi300/cmr10.pk
    as opposed to fonts like
    fonts/pk/CanonDX/fetamont/dpi300/cmr10.pk for a differently named

Hmm, that's certainly the most general solution. But, as you say,
specifying `metafont' for the common case seems a bit painful.

    something like fonts/pk/CanonDX/dpi*/*.pk -- oops, I believe web2c
    will *not* currently allow patterns like that, perhaps it should?).

No, it doesn't, and no, I don't want to implement complete filename
globbing :-). (And even if I did, the TDS could never promulgate a
solution that requires such a thing.)