[twg-tds] storing scripts in the texmf tree

[Olaf Weber]

Paul Vojta writes:
> On Sat, Feb 14, 2004 at 02:16:23PM +0100, Olaf Weber wrote:
>> Paul Vojta writes:

>>> I'm continually dismayed at the amount of effort that goes into
>>> opening a few files.  (I'm one who likes short wide trees, not
>>> wide narrow ones.)

>> Of course the tds effectively mandates the latter, with all
>> attendant problems, inorder to avoid having directories with
>> thousands of entries.

> I find that argument to be a bit circular, since the TDS grew out of kpse.

I'm not familiar with that part of the history of the TDS, but I
understand that the TDS was in part inspired by the fact that
directories with many thousands of entries became unmanagable (and on
some filesystems (FAT) unbearably slow).  Perhaps Karl knows to what
extent you are correct.

[...]

> This is on Debian linux, which relies on external databases to manage
> the complexity of having ~2500 entries in /usr/share/man/man3, for
> example.  This is a road that I would like to see kpse go down.

But kpse is not a packaging system, which is what you are asking for
here.  As I understand it, one reason the TDS looks like it does is
that it tries to do two things:

- not impose a particular packaging system, and make managing packages
  by hand feasible
- allow for "simple" subdirectory searches to find files

The latter is the reason we have
    texmf/tex/<package>
    texmf/font/tfm/<supplier>/<package>
and so on instead of
    texmf/<package>/tex
    texmf/<package>/tfm
It happens to be the case that for kpathsea the latter is no problem,
but (and Karl should know more about this) that the implementation
burden on non-kpathsea implementation was considered too large.

-- 
Olaf Weber

               (This space left blank for technical reasons.)