`nahuatl` package not in TeX Live

[Don Hosek]

> On 20 Dec 2021, at 08:48, Philip Taylor (Hellenic Institute) <P.Taylor at Hellenic-Institute.Uk> wrote:
> 
> On 19/12/2021 21:52, Karl Berry wrote:
>>     is there any reason for TeX Live to not provide the `nahuatl` package :
>> 
>> Yes. The main one is that the author used the filename "U.mf", which is
>> not something I can install in the runtime; it needs to be (for example)
>> nahuatl-U.mf. 
> Is that because it would conflict with (e.g.,) "C:\TeX\Live\2021\texmf-dist\fonts\source\public\levy\u.mf", or for some other reason ?
> -- 
> Philip Taylor
> 
It’s the duplication of names. This is an old problem: TeX and friends effectively have their files living in a flat namespace¹ so every TeX file in TeX live needs to be uniquely named and similarly every MF file needs to be uniquely named. 

-dh

⸻⸻⸻
1. It’s worth noting that at the time of TeX’s creation and well into the 80s some common operating systems did not even have a mechanism for subdirectories of any kind. PC-DOS first gained subdirectories with version 2.0 in 1983 and VM/CMS never supported them (files were kept in virtual disks and the OS would respond to a request for U MF by starting with disk A (the user disk) and going through all the disks in alphabetical order up to Z until it found the file).
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://tug.org/pipermail/tex-live/attachments/20211220/618634d2/attachment.html>