Olaf Weber <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > The current behaviour of the kpathsea library (which Web2C TeX uses > to find files) when given 'story' is to look for 'story.tex' in > every directory of the search path, then do a second search for > 'story' if nothing was found. > > We've had some discussions with Knuth about this, and the upshot was > that we agreed that this did violate the principle of least > surprise. > > It would be better for Web2C TeX to look for 'story.tex' and then > 'story' in the first directory of the search path, then look for both > in the second, and so on until the first match is found.
Just in order to vent my opinion about this, I disagree. I don't think it better when the occurence of an extensionless file (could be a binary, for all that it is worth) somewhere in the search path suddenly causes different behaviour. In particular, plain TeX just has the standard extension .tex. If you use some plain TeX macro file, it will include other plain TeX packages via \input. If any such file happened to have an extensionless cousin in the current directory, then that file would be used instead. And the user could not even trace it back to a file name conflict since in his current directory there *is* no file with a name identical to that of the now excluded file in the search tree. Reverting to an extensionless file should be done really only as a last resort, in my opinion. -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
