David Kastrup writes:
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
>> I'm not sure if this is totally specific to tetex... but I find it very
>> annoying when I do something like this:
>> tex story
>> expecting the file 'story' in the current directory to be processed.
>> Unfortunately, the file /usr/share/texmf/tex/plain/base/story.tex is the
>> one which is processed. One way around this is to rename the local file
>> story.tex.
>> So, is there something in my config files I'm getting wrong?
> No, there is somwthing wrong with your file naming conventions. TeX
> is *supposed* to be looking for file xxx.tex first, then for xxx.
Actually, the original TeX does not allow filenames without extension
at all: if you run 'tex story' it would only look for 'story.tex'. It
is an extension of Web2C to allow the extension to be omitted.
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.
Bob's is (as far as I know) the first complaint I've seen about this
particular aspect of Web2C/kpathsea.
> Is there a particular reason for the file names you use?
I would certainly recommend changing the names if you ever want to run
other versions of TeX on these files, as well as to work around the
current problem.
--
Olaf Weber
(This space left blank for technical reasons.)
