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Defining the TDS required many compromises. Both the overall
structure and the details of the individual directories were arrived at
by finding common ground among many opinions. The driving forces were
feasibility (in terms of what could technically be done and what could
reasonably be expected from developers) and regularity (files grouped
together in an arrangement that "made sense").
Some interesting ideas could not be applied due to implementations
lacking the necessary support:
- Path searching control at the TeX level. If documents could
restrict subdirectory searching to a subdirectory via some portable
syntax in file names, restrictions on uniqueness of filenames could be
relaxed considerably (with the cooperation of the formats), and the
TeX search path would not need to depend on the format.
- Multiple logical `texmf' trees. For example, a site might have
one (read-only) location for stable files, and a different (writable)
location for dynamically-created fonts or other files. It would be
reasonable for two such trees to be logically merged when searching.
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