[tex-live] Kpathsea in TL2007

[Philip & Le Khanh]

Heiko Oberdiek wrote:

> But (a) prevents that "foo" can be loaded if
> both "foo" and "foo.tex" exist. :-(

Yes, this point has been raised before.  The real problem
is (a) that users actually use files with no extension, and
that (b) under *X, "foo." is not the same as "foo".  Under
Windows, there is no problem : if one /really/ wants to
access a file with a missing extension, one specifies
"<filename>."; sadly this doesn't work under *X, so
as Heiko points out, *X implementations of TeX are
unable to load "foo" if "foo.tex" exists and is in the
search path.  I would confess to being /extremely/
surprised if this were to cause any problems in real
life.

As an aside, why anyone would want to have a file called
"foo" (as opposed to than "foo.<something>") is beyond
my comprehension : it is as insane (IMHO) as the Windows
default behaviour of /hiding/ file extensions.  How anyone
is expected to know what sort of file "foo" is (whether
he/she has actually chosen to call it "foo", or whether
Windows has patronizingly hidden the extension) is
equally beyond me.  This caused real problems when creating
a PERL script on someone else's machine last week : Windows
said the file was called "Test-1.pl", whilst Perl said that
"Test-1.pl" does not exist.  It turned out that the file was
actually called "Test-1.pl.txt" : classic Microsoft insanity :-(

Philip Taylor