(tds.info)Is there a better way?

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Appendix C Is there a better way?
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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.  See Michael Downes' article in the references for how
     this can work in practice with Web2C.

Macro structure

Font structure

Documentation structure