[twg-tds] [gaulle@idris.fr: a TDS question]

[Thomas Esser]

On Fri, Jun 20, 2003 at 09:33:59AM -0400, Karl Berry wrote:
>     1) was an example of a typical pb: if files names doesn't differ
>        from, for example, one language to another, how proceed within
>        the TDS tree? since language switch may occur along a document.
> 
> In general, as far as I can recall kpathsea's ls-R approach to indexing
> requires that all filenames are unique.  This is, of course, an

No. [Even at times where you have maintained kpathsea, this restriction
did not exist and it was never added. :-)]

teTeX has a few non-unique names in texmf/tex. One example is fonttext.cfg:
  texmf/tex/generic/config/fonttext.cfg
  texmf/tex/cslatex/fonttext.cfg

The cslatex-file is only picked up by the cslatex format which has:
  TEXINPUTS.cslatex = .;$TEXMF/{etex,tex}/{cslatex,csplain,latex,generic,}//

Other formats don't have cslatex explicitly mentioned, but they all search
texmf/tex/generic// before texmf/tex// is searched, so everything except
cslatex will pick up fonttext.cfg from "generic".

So, the general rule is that if there are conflicting files, then each
search path has to be set up in such a way that the first search path
component that matches one of the files does not match all the other
files.

So, it would be wrong to have some format which uses
  TEXINPUTS=$TEXMF/tex//
(instead of e.g. TEXINPUTS=$TEXMF/tex/generic//:$TEXMF/tex//).

Thomas