[tex-live] mktexlsr ignores "rcs" on a Windows 7 machine

Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard mpg at elzevir.fr
Wed Aug 18 18:25:30 CEST 2010


Le 18/08/2010 16:40, Zdenek Wagner a écrit :
> 2010/8/18 Philip Taylor (Webmaster, Ret'd) <P.Taylor at rhul.ac.uk>:
>>
>> But it would be perfectly reasonable for a TeX user (Windows,
>> Unix, whatever) to /want/ a directory called (case-irrelevant)
>> "RCS", "CVS", or whatever, so to deliberately ignore such
>> directories just because they /might/ be something to
>> do with a Revision Control System, or a C-dontknow
>> ?Versioning? System would seem to me a fairly major design
>> error to me.

Well, one could argue that the rcs directory ignored has something to do with
RCS, since rsc.sty is about using information from RCS keywords ;-)

But obviously, shipping a package in a directory using a special name that our
tools will ignore is a bug and we're going to fix it.

>> How many normal TeX users have even /heard/
>> of RCS or CVS, let alone use one or other in conjunction
>> with their TeX work ?
>>
I'm take it you're thinking of a definition of "normal" such that the answer is:
"zero, by definition" ;-)

> I would prefer another solution. TL developers know what directories
> are ignored and they decide what the directory names of the packages
> would be. Knowing that TL  may be installed on a case insensitive file
> system, the directory names in the TL packages should be made safe
> with this respect.
> 
Sounds reasonable. I just checked, and the rcs package is the only problematic
case, so we could just rename it to something like rcs-pkg, for example.

The only problem remaining would be a user installing something in a directory
names rcs in texmf-local (texmfhome is not a problem since it doesn't use a ls-R
index file by default). So we could also decide to stop ignoring RCS and CVS
directories (it seems really unlikely to me that someone ever wants to use a
directory named .<something> or _darcs).

I'm not very familiar with RCS nor CVS, but I'm under the impression the files
in "real" RCS or CVS directories are unlikely to be confused with other files,
since they either end with ",v" (RCS) or are name "Entries" or "Repository"
(CVS). So, if the only harm they do by being included in a ls-R index is slowing
down the lookups a little bit, maybe it would be acceptable?

Manuel.


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