[tex-live] Kpathsea in TL2007

[Karl Berry]

    As an aside, why anyone would want to have a file called "foo"

On Unix, executables are named, for example, "dvips", without any
extension.  When someone runs "tex dvips", they expect to find
dvips.tex, not the dvips binary.  After umpteen bug reports about this,
I proposed and implemented the rules as they are now (some 15 years ago).
It seems various changes have been made since then, but I think the
basic strategy still holds.

It seems fine to me that the behavior on Windows is different in this
regard, because Windows executables (and files in general) aren't
extensionless.

I fully support Heiko's suggestion of a new primitive with grouping
characters so that arbitrary filenames can be read.  I imagine the
pdftex or ntg-pdftex list is the best place to discuss that.

k