[tex-live] Kpathsea in TL2007

[Heiko Oberdiek]

On Sun, Feb 18, 2007 at 12:20:08PM +0000, Philip & Le Khanh wrote:

> 
> 
> Heiko Oberdiek wrote:
> 
> >But (a) prevents that "foo" can be loaded if
> >both "foo" and "foo.tex" exist. :-(
> 
> Yes, this point has been raised before.  The real problem
> is (a) that users actually use files with no extension, and
> that (b) under *X, "foo." is not the same as "foo".  Under
> Windows, there is no problem : if one /really/ wants to
> access a file with a missing extension, one specifies
> "<filename>."; sadly this doesn't work under *X, so
> as Heiko points out, *X implementations of TeX are
> unable to load "foo" if "foo.tex" exists and is in the
> search path.  I would confess to being /extremely/
> surprised if this were to cause any problems in real
> life.

Quite easy. I do have a directory with both
README and README.tex. But consider a TeX driver file that
formats plain text files nicely for printing
(e.g. listings package, ...), README cannot be processed.

> As an aside, why anyone would want to have a file called
> "foo" (as opposed to than "foo.<something>") is beyond
> my comprehension :

There are many such files in the real world, examples:
  Makefile, README, COPYING, LICENSE, NEWS, ChangeLog, ...

> it is as insane (IMHO) as the Windows
> default behaviour of /hiding/ file extensions.

Agreed, this is one of the first things I change if I have to
work on a windows system.

Yours sincerely
  Heiko <oberdiek at uni-freiburg.de>