[tex-live] behaviour of kpsewhich on case-insensitive mac system

Karl Berry karl at freefriends.org
Wed Sep 20 00:42:38 CEST 2017


What I can imagine doing is first looking up the name as-is, and iff
that fails, doing a case-insensitive lookup. Patches welcome, else I
will put it on my ever-lengthening list. It essentially amounts to
removing the compile-time configuration done now, and falling back to
the case-insensitive test regardless of the system.

It would be wrong to "randomly" return any case-insensitive match if an
exact match exists.  That is, on Unix, \input FOO.TEX should prefer a
file named "FOO.TEX" to "foo.tex".

-k

P.S. Explanation of the current behavior: Kpathsea was written at a time
when in practice there was no such thing as an operating system which
supported both case-insensitve and case-sensitive filesystems. (Also at
a time when no one dreamed that a company would make such a disruptive
and incompatible change to their systems, but never mind.)  Therefore
the test was done at configure time.  In kpathsea/config.h there is:

#if defined(OS2)     || \
    defined(MSDOS)   || defined(__MSDOS__) || defined(DOS)    || \
    defined(WIN32)   || defined(__WIN32__) || defined(_WIN32) || \
    defined(DJGPP)   || defined(__DJGPP__) || \
    defined(MINGW32) || defined(__MINGW32__)
#define DOSISH
#endif

which is ultimately what determines whether case-sensitive or
-insensitive test is done.

(Zdenek, why this does not match on your OS/2 system, I can't say.)


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