[twg-tds] [gaulle@idris.fr: a TDS question]

[Karl Berry]

    That means that if you have "." in your search path, and your
    texmf.cnf is not set up not to scan "." recursively, nothing should be
    found.

Reinhard, I agree with basically your whole message, except I don't
understand this conclusion.  If TEXINPUTS=., and the .tex file says
  \input dir/file
and the system has
  ./dir/file
then it would be found.  Recursive searching is not needed.

    But what we have to discuss here at first is whether we should remove
    the rule that filenames have to be unique in a TDS compliant system

Well, as Thomas said earlier, it's not exactly that they have to be
unique (after all, in practice, there are many duplicate filenames in
TeX trees).  But any duplicate names are found according to the search
paths and if there's more than one possibility, what you get is not
specified.

    and we have to investigate whether it can break existing
    implementations.

I think this is more recognizing existing practice.  The only problem I
see with it is that the exact syntax
  \input dir/file
with / as the separator will not work on MS-DOS and older Mac versions,
so the .tex file would not be portable.  Can someone confirm that it
does work in MacOSX?

(Regardless, that's no reason not to move forward, in my view.)

Thanks,
karl