[tex-k] accessing MySQL w/kpathsea

[Karl Berry]

    What about bibtex? Wouldn't the same problem persist there? 

I don't know what "problem" you mean, but yes, our implementation of
bibtex uses kpathsea (as you know), and so all the same stuff applies.

    bibtex-like functionality should be pretty much be workable directly
    through luatex now

I don't understand.  BibTeX has its own job to do.  Sure, I guess you
could reprogram it in Lua, but I don't see the point.

BTW, there is an experimental package which does *all* formatting of bib
entries using LaTeX, and just uses bibtex for sorting.
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/biblatex.html

    But these files are searched according to different path-values, right? 

Sure.

    Are filesystem lookups that much faster than database-lookups?

It's never been compared, that I know of.  I don't think you can make
any general statements about it.  It probably depends on many factors,
like the size of the caches on the hard disk, the speed of the cpu for
the database, how the database is indexed, etc., etc.

    Am I completely off here?

Is this all about speed?  I wouldn't expect any huge speed gains from
using an sql database.

    These are textbased databases, as far as what I get. Are
    lookup times in them faster than in a mysql-base?

Again, I don't know, but I highly doubt it's significant.  All kpse does
is read ls-R (a relatively small text file) into a hash table.  It's
hard to imagine mysql being much faster than that.  If there were
millions of entries, it would be a different story, but thankfully
there's not.

    What do you mean? just redefine \input{XX} and \include{XX} ? 

No, nothing at the TeX level, that would be completely unworkable.  I
meant a shell script that does the sql commands to extract the input
file.  I thought you were aiming to create a specific application that
needed reports formatted with TeX.

But now it seems you want to replace TeX file lookups, in general.
About all I can do is wish you luck.

    until luatex becomes usable --

LuaTeX is usable.  Not stable/frozen, but usable.

karl