Helmut Kopka's interpretation of the TDS

[Pierre MacKay]

   o    TeX and its support programs become bigger and slower.
   o    If you want to look directly at a macro file (e.g., plain.tex or
        amstex.tex) (which I do from time to time), then you have to dig
        to find it.

This is giving a name a bad dog.

The TDS specifications do not do anything to the size of TeX, they
do seem to create a few more inodes on a Unix system than the more
rational ;-} way of setting up the tree, but they say nothing about
the size of TeX itself.  

The inclusion of the kpathsea library does add a bit:
I show -rwxr-xr-x   2 texmf    adm       101284 Oct  5  1995 libkpse.so
for the shared object library, and 147000 bytes for the static library
With an up-to-date ls-R database, I don't sense any serious
delay introduced by kpathsea at all.  I very much doubt that
a huge TEXINPUTS etc set of environments such as I used to use
would make things any nippier.

As for looking at a macro file directly---in a complex TeX
environment, with numerous TeX, LaTeX and metafont packages
I find
alias kpsemore 'set xxx=`kpsewhich \!$` && echo $xxx ; more $xxx'
absolutely liberating.  It gives me both the path and the
text of the macro file without any difficulty at all.

I also use kpsecp to bring working copies into a private directory.

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