Helmut Kopka's interpretation of the TDS

[Pierre MacKay]

 > No, but a short TEXINPUTS resulting from putting all the input files in
 > one directory would (at least from a user's point of view).  See my
 > previous e-mail.

It's clearly a matter of taste, as I learned when one of the users on
the old Publications TeX system refused even to consider directory trees,
but I find flat file systems with several hundred files in a single
directory quite unmanageable.  Indeed, one of the first impulses to
the development of Karl Berry's path searching was the frustration of
trying to maintain such huge flat systems.  

Before kpathsea developed its present efficiency and reliability
I used to link all files of a given category into a single dummy
TEXINPUTS (or whatever) directory, but once kpathsea got working
I found that refreshing ls-R seemed more satisfactory.  And, in any
case, many of the environments from which protests about kpathsea
arise, can't do symbolic linking either, so one really is presented
with the requirement of huge flat directories.  

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