Modules/getpath.c chases links?

[Edward Jason Riedy]

And "Fred L. Drake, Jr." writes:
 - 
 -   Without that, automatic detection of the installation directories
 - becomes massively fragile.  

I'm complaining because it broke.  

 -   I'm not sure I follow.  This sounds incredibly difficult to
 - maintain.  What does it buy you?

Uniformity across hundreds of packages.  See http://www.cise.ufl.edu/depot/.
I'm not terribly fond of the CMU depot software (there are other 
implementations), but the organization works quite well.  It's not at 
all complex.  Everything gets to play dumb and assume all its pieces are 
where it expects.  Most things just work.  With a few thoughtful variable 
settings, even Perl's CPAN.pm works.

 -   kpathsea is overkill for most things; anything that doesn't have the 
 - number of critical configuration items that a TeX installation has
 - doesn't need such a heavy approach.

True, but it works.

I suppose it works by being overly clever and configurable.  I prefer
packages to take the dumb, installer-said-I-was-installed-here-so-I-was
approach.  Being to clever makes packages less predictable, and that's
bad.

Jason