[tex-live] kpsewhich case insensitive?

[Karl Berry]

    Sigh...

Agreed.

    But I (and other users) could be bitten 

Yes, I know. Do you really think we were unaware of this?

    Hence why not the other way round: `texmf_casefold_search' 0 by default

I thought hard about doing it this way. I hate making incompatible
changes. I think this is the first user-level kpse change intentionally
made in ten years or more.

I think I wrote all this before, but I guess I'll do it again:

The change is motivated for the case of big documents being developed on
Macs, and thus \include and \includegraphics commands (for example) use
randomly cased filenames and work regardless. Then the document is
compiled on normal Unix and failures abound. It is a big pain to fix
this. There can easily be hundreds of images or subfiles involved. 
This situation is more common than you or I might wish :(. 
You can look it up on tex.sx etc.

Thus, it's a trade-off between causing strange new failures in the
strange case of case-conflicting files, and helping document projects
that are developed on both Mac and (other) Unix "just work" without
having to change anything.

I felt it was better for the TeX world, overall, if such rare case
conflicts were explicitly dealt with, one way or another, partly because
these same problems *have always existed* on Windows. By dealing with
the case conflicts, documents automatically become more portable.

If the case conflicts were going to be common, I would have decided
otherwise. But I believe your case is rare -- in practice, I think the
only likely culprit is, like yours, a file in TEXMFHOME with a
case-different name from one in TEXMFDIST. Not that many people use
TEXMFHOME in the first place, let alone install style files with only a
case change from a standard name.

If it turns out to be too painfully common, we can always change the
default.

    They are so much powerful? ;)

Evidently so :(. -k