[tex-live] Omega and the recent changes in TDS

Karl Berry karl at freefriends.org
Mon Aug 29 03:04:18 CEST 2005


Back on this thread from a week ago (sorry).  I'm afraid I am quite lost.

    It would be good if we could find a better solution for checking for
    existence than putting the files into TEXINPUTS. 

I certainly agree that a primitive for finding OCP files would be ideal.
But since I gather there is no such primitive now (and never has been
and it will certainly be quite a process to create one), it seems quite
undesirable to simply break existing tests like Aleksey's with no
replacement.

Adding $TEXMF/omega/ocp// to the omega-related search paths, while
annoying, doesn't seem especially harmful to me, compared to the benefit.

    (Karl: it might make sense to extend the TDS for this -- explicitly
    allow tex/<engine> in addition to tex/<format>).

Seems reasonable.  The implication being that we would add
$TEXMF/tex/$engine to the search paths -- and $TEXMF/tex/omega to the
aleph/lamed paths, etc.

In the original mail, I see Alexej proposing that tex/generic/encodings
should be moved since it is Omega-specific.  I guess
tex/omega/encodings?  tex/omega/generic/encodings?
tex/omega/plain/encodings?  I don't know enough to say what's best.

What else, if anything, is omega-specific in the same way?

    why it is necessary to
    simplify its task by placing them together?

As explained in the rationale I sent earlier, the main issue is that
engines aren't really a good distinction, because they are so similar.
tex, etex, pdftex, pdfetex are all "almost" the same, and ditto omega
and aleph.  Most packages need no changes to run under any of the above,
and of the rest, most adapt themselves to whatever is running.  So
trying to put files under an engine-specific directory usually turned
out to be wrong; they actually ran under other engines.

I don't think there is any really good way to handle this, because of
all the inconsistencies and incompatibilities.  (Not to mention lack of
updates in the base programs.)

    For example, most lambda-specific files in antomega 
    also have unique names, but I hope this doesn't mean I have to 
    put them into tex/latex/ rather than tex/lambda/?

No.  As far as lambda is concerned, the search path looks like this:
TEXINPUTS.lambda = $TEXMF/tex/{lambda,latex,generic,}//

texmf/tex/lambda/antomega certainly seems like the right location for
your package.  Is there a problem with that?  I am confused about what
you need.  If you put your hyphen.cfg there, it will get read before any
hyphen.cfg under latex.

For reference, you can see all the current search path definitions at 
http://tug.org/texlive/devsrc/Master/texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf
It's nearly the same as TL 2004.  And all the formats do have their own
directories.  

This message probably just confuses things more, sorry.  It certainly
confuses me.

Best,
Karl



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