Hans Hagen
anyhow, by now, no alias file should be present in any tex root any more; it was a bad idea anyway
I always thought that the purpose of the aliases file was that a non-existent (no, nay, never, nowhere ever) filename was aliased to an existent one, like in the documentation part: % documentation TETEXDOC.pdf teTeX.pdf etex-man.pdf etex.pdf pdftex-a.pdf pdftex.pdf testeuro.dvi eurosym.dvi If the rest of the aliases covers files that might exist as real files on some systems - I agree, what a bad idea.
pool files normally are in web2c paths; future versions of pdftex and mpost have the pool file embedded so this problem will (hopefully) disappear
Ah, I didn't know that. pdftex 1.40 doesn't have this already, has it?
hm, interesting; lean and mean texmf.cnf files can speed up things a lot
when playing with luatex (where i intend to replace kpse completely with a lua based variant) it is possible to have format specific file databases; this runs much faster; this whole ls-r stuff is pretty outdated
Oh, yes, it is. Current kpse also has the "side effect" that on most systems, users are able to fill up the /var/ partition by generating pixel fonts... Karl (or was it Olaf?) once said there are plans for a complete replacement of libkpathsea, named kpse - would that be obsolete with luatex? Could there be a C wrapper about lua's kpse?
sure, but (i'm not sure if this is still true) running tex live alongside a tetex was always kind of problematic due to path settings and this autoparent mess then deriving locations of texmf.cnf from it
This is probably still a problem in standard-setup systems. Regards, Frank -- Dr. Frank Küster Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)