[tex-live] pretest: epstopdf overwrites existing files

[Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard]

Karl Berry a écrit :
> Hi Heiko and all,
> 
>     Or with option "append", it searches for PDF files first (and
>     doesn't trigger the conversion if the PDF file exists.)
> 
> Thanks very much for that.  I've changed prepend to append in
> graphics.cfg; that seems safer for the general TeX Live setting,

I fully agree.

> while
> still providing the conversion functionality in the common case.
> 
Well, I'm not so sure.

Imagine a rather naive author, trying to include an eps file in a TeX document
compiled with pdflatex. It works the first time, she's very happy. Then she
notice her .eps was wrong and change it. She recompiles. Nothing changes. At
this point, she's disapointed, and starts thinking of TeX as a non-deterministic
piece of software just like ms-word. Too bad.

A pdf generated by epstopdf is sort an intermediate file like .log, .aux, etc.
Most .pdf files are not intermediate files. The real problem is to distinguish
between those too kinds of pdf files. How about using a specific extension for
auxiliary pdf files, such as .epstopdf? I think it eliminates the core problem
of knowing whether the pdf can be overwritten or not.

Of course, it would require some adaptations to the code, but it should be doable.

Manuel.