[tex-live] kpsewhich search order and how to change it

[Karl Berry]

Hi Philip,

    /home/aid/holzensp hits are not grouped together). Should this be 
    considered a bug?

It's an inescapable (if confusing) result of the way things are defined.
All kpathsea is doing is normal brace expansion.  I doubt that adding a
new feature of "depth-first" brace expansion would make things any
clearer.

Also, it's not clear to me that it is desirable to search all the
directories in a given tree (~/texmf or whatever) before all the
first-level items (latex/ in this case) in all the trees.  In fact, it
seems to me that that would have a much greater chance of finding the
wrong file.

    The reason that I have a single directory for the entire pgf package 

I hear you, and I too find the splitting apart of a package into
different directories very painful.  Unfortunately it is not obvious (at
least to me) how to improve things.  I've had various ideas, but they
all cause as many problems as improvements.

    or to make an explicit note about this behaviour somewhere.

The general behavior is documented in the Kpathsea manual (and briefly
at the top of texmf.cnf too).  I admit the behavior you were seeing is
not easy to pull out from the documentation, but I don't know how to
improve it.  If you have a specific suggestion, I'm glad to incorporate
it.

Glad it all worked out in the end, anyway.

Karl