Info Catalog tds: Implementation issues tds: Top tds: Related references

tds: Is there a better way?

 
 Appendix C Is there a better way?
 *********************************
 
 Defining the TDS required many compromises.  Both the overall structure
 and the details of the individual directories were arrived at by
 finding common ground among many opinions.  The driving forces were
 feasibility (in terms of what could technically be done and what could
 reasonably be expected from developers) and regularity (files grouped
 together in an arrangement that "made sense").
 
    Some interesting ideas could not be applied due to implementations
 lacking the necessary support:
 
    * Path searching control at the TeX level. If documents could
      restrict subdirectory searching to a subdirectory via some portable
      syntax in file names, restrictions on uniqueness of filenames
      could be relaxed considerably (with the cooperation of the
      formats), and the TeX search path would not need to depend on the
      format.
 
    * Multiple logical `texmf' trees. For example, a site might have one
      (read-only) location for stable files, and a different (writable)
      location for dynamically-created fonts or other files. It would be
      reasonable for two such trees to be logically merged when
      searching.  See Michael Downes' article in the references for how
      this can work in practice with Web2C.
 
 

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· Macro structure
· Font structure
· Documentation structure
 

Info Catalog tds: Implementation issues tds: Top tds: Related references