[twg-tds] storing scripts in the texmf tree

[Karl Berry]

    Perhaps Karl knows to what extent you are correct.

It is true that the TDS was influenced by Kpathsea, to the extent that I
was the only who mostly wrote it, to begin with, and Kpathsea was
essentially the only system at the time with any structure at all, as
far as I knew.  Most everything else just had single directories for all
macros, all fonts, etc.

However, the TDS was not my personal project, by any means.  Many people
both on this list and, even more importantly, tex-implementors read it
carefully, and many changes were made.  The result did not match
kpathsea or any existing system.

Personally, I don't think it's fruitful to consider wholesale changes to
the approach at this late date.  All we're trying to do is find files.
It's more important to work on real functionality.

    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.

It is true that some people on tex-implementors resisted implementing
caching, and thus texmf/<package> was not adopted.  The actual case at
the time was the "per-package" texmf/fonts/<foundry>/<typeface>/<filetype>
vs. the "per-file" texmf/fonts/<filetype>/<foundry>/<typeface>.

I have the impression that a number of other implementations have
implemented caching since, but I don't know if it's universal.


Anyway, enough history :).  I'll make another draft based on Hans'
comments shortly.  (Thanks Hans.)