[tex-live] Omega and the recent changes in TDS

[Karl Berry]

Hi Alexej,

(I see Thomas also replied, but here's my take anyway.)

Thanks for writing.  I'm glad that you are continuing to work on antomega.

    at this point teTeX just mirrors directory structure changes in TL,

Well, technically/supposedly both teTeX and TL follow the TDS, but in
practice the same people work on all these projects, so it hardly
matters which mailing list is used.

    The problem is, that these files are loaded by
    lambda compiler as any other files (e. g. style packages)

Well, that's a bad situation.

So omega and lambda do not use OTPINPUTS and OCPINPUTS to find otp/ocp
files?  If not, then why do those variables exist?  I'm confused.  (I
admit I did not review the sources.)

    other files which can hardly be integrated into the new directory

Right now, there is a tex/lambda/antomega directory, which is (I
presume) found by lambda.  Is this a problem to use for the location?
Is antomega tied to lambda, by the way (as opposed to plain omega)?

As for hyphen.cfg, how about giving the file a unique name, like
antohyphen.cfg?  That would avoid any confusion, either by computers or
humans.

In any case, the search path for lambda is
  .;$TEXMF/tex/{lambda,latex,generic,}/
so your hyphen.cfg (or other files) would be found first.

    separately from patterns used by Babel, 

They should certainly be separate from any babel files, since they are
provided by antomega, not babel.  We try to keep files from any given
package together, and distinct from other packages, although it's not
100%.

In general, we tried to explain the reason for moving omega/lambda input
files to the tex/ tree (even though the original tex cannot read them)
in the tds revision, as below.  I understand that antomega is never
going to be read by latex, so the first reason doesn't apply, but does
the location under tex/ hurt?  I don't see why, exactly ...

Best,
Karl


\item Authors of relevant packages typically make their code detect the
engine being used, and issue error messages or adapt to circumstances
appropriately.  Furthermore, as a package matures, it may support
multiple engines.  Thus, a package could conceivably be placed in any of
several top-level directories, at different times.  Putting all packages
under the top-level \path|tex| directory provides a stable location over
time.

\item Users need to be able to switch between engines, and configuring
different search paths for each engine is difficult and error-prone.

\end{itemize}

Thus, in practice, having different top-level directories caused
difficulties for everyone involved---users, package authors, site
administrators, and system distributors.