[tex-live] kpsewhich case insensitive?

[George N. White III]

On 6 April 2018 at 20:35, Karl Berry <karl at freefriends.org> wrote:

>     Sigh...
>
> Agreed.
>
>     But I (and other users) could be bitten
>
> Yes, I know. Do you really think we were unaware of this?
>
>     Hence why not the other way round: `texmf_casefold_search' 0 by default
>
> I thought hard about doing it this way. I hate making incompatible
> changes. I think this is the first user-level kpse change intentionally
> made in ten years or more.
>
> I think I wrote all this before, but I guess I'll do it again:
>
> The change is motivated for the case of big documents being developed on
> Macs, and thus \include and \includegraphics commands (for example) use
> randomly cased filenames and work regardless. Then the document is
> compiled on normal Unix and failures abound. It is a big pain to fix
> this. There can easily be hundreds of images or subfiles involved.
> This situation is more common than you or I might wish :(.
> You can look it up on tex.sx etc.
>
> Thus, it's a trade-off between causing strange new failures in the
> strange case of case-conflicting files, and helping document projects
> that are developed on both Mac and (other) Unix "just work" without
> having to change anything.
>

I have been involved with multi-author projects where the authors are
scattered
across the globe and many are in government  research institutes and must
use a "departmental standard" OS configuration.  I can vouch for the wasted
time and effort caused when documents that work on Windows or macOS fail
on linux due to mis-cased filenames.


> I felt it was better for the TeX world, overall, if such rare case
> conflicts were explicitly dealt with, one way or another, partly because
> these same problems *have always existed* on Windows. By dealing with
> the case conflicts, documents automatically become more portable.
>
> If the case conflicts were going to be common, I would have decided
> otherwise. But I believe your case is rare -- in practice, I think the
> only likely culprit is, like yours, a file in TEXMFHOME with a
> case-different name from one in TEXMFDIST. Not that many people use
> TEXMFHOME in the first place, let alone install style files with only a
> case change from a standard name.
>
> If it turns out to be too painfully common, we can always change the
> default.
>
>     They are so much powerful? ;)
>
> Evidently so :(. -k
>

In a large project you can have people with very different interests and
skills.
For some, the project may be their first encounter with TeX.  It is not
just a
question of how common problems might be, but also the likelihood that
the person who encounters a problem will have some idea of how to go
about sorting it out.   Keeping mis-case errors close to the where they are
made is often advantage.

-- 
George N. White III
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