You wrote:
>
> It is maybe a bit too web2c-ish to point out that duplicate names are
> often a sign of a badly maintained tree
I don't think so. In the context of web2c; two cases, macros and fonts:
Macros:
-- If you create a distribution, do you have LaTeX2e _and_ a
rudimentary LaTeX 2.09 system on them? Let's assume, no.
Then you won't have duplicate names in the macro area.
(Well, not often. E.g., currently one needs two german.sty, an
older version for Plain TeX, and the current version for LaTeX... :(
-- If you administrate a TeX installation for a whole universities or
even a bunch of universities (e.g., many German universities share
one *installation* over AFS) -- do you have both LaTeX2e and LaTeX
2.09 installed? Here we cannot assume that that's not the case.
Too many legacy documents are around where such an
installation needs to provice LaTeX 2.09. -- And then we have the
name conflicts.
Fonts:
-- Font names were in conflict from the very start. A name like
cmr10.300pk tells nothing about the mode, and many medium-sized
installations have more than one output device with different
modes. (Even at home I use three different modedefs for the
three printers I have.)
Cheers,
Joachim
--
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Joachim Schrod Email: schrod@iti.informatik.th-darmstadt.de
Computer Science Department
Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany