Helmut Kopka's interpretation of the TDS

[Thomas Esser]

> I think TDS is adapted to Unix and not adapted to PC because of
> (at least) two technical reasons, that are bound to each other:
> 1 - there is no equivalent of "ln" Unix command, neither in DOS,
> nor OS/2 nor Windows 95 nor Windows NT. Therefore, users can have
> several TDS hierarchies if they have several disks.

Do you really mean "ln"? Why do you think that you need "ln"? Or,
is this just a typo and you wanted to write "ls"? Yes, "ls" would
be handy to do hashing like web2cīs ls-R. But, there is a freely
available ls program for DOS.

> 2 - Length allowed for environment variables is very short (127
> characters in DOS and DOS emulators of OS/2 and Windows95/NT). 
> This can put users into trouble as no OS warns when truncating
> environment variables.

Using a config file like web2cīs texmf.cnf would solve this problem.

Thomas