[AUCTeX-devel] Re: Interface of kpathsea file search

[Ralf Angeli]

* David Kastrup (2005-11-23) writes:

> Ralf Angeli <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> As far as I understand the variable's doc string and intention the
>> first item in each element is rather something like a format as used
>> by the kpse* tools, e.g. as in `kpsewhich -progname latex -format tex
>> article.cls'.
>
> It is exactly "something like": we use it as a clue to detect what
> kind of search would be wanted from kpathsea.  Maybe we should indeed
> use progname instead of TEXINPUTS.latex, but I don't know what the
> MikTeX substitutes will actually do in either case.
>
>> But we are using it as file extension.
>
> We are _mapping_ it to a file type and a set of extensions.
>
> I am not saying this is pretty.  It is merely trying to use kpathsea
> transparently without changing all the callers of the file search
> functions.

But the callers pass file extensions to the search function(s).
Usually `TeX-search-files-kpathsea' is called through
`TeX-search-files' and `TeX-search-files' accepts only a list of
extensions, not some abstraction of it.  So the _intention_ of
`TeX-kpathsea-format-alist' is a mapping of something like a format
specifier to a file type and a set of extensions but the actual usage
differs.

-- 
Ralf