>> well, if you take the TeX Live CD, there are 213 LaTeX packages with >> at least 1 file, maybe several. Say 500 files; if >> you do \usepackage{foo}, at a minimum you have to scan the tree >> containing those 500 files to locate foo.sty. Is that good or bad? Let's leave this to one side for the moment, because the next case is easier to analyse" >> Then again my CD has over 5000 tfm files. If I do >> \font\foo=foo.tfm >> you are going to have to look at all of them, arent you? hard to see >> how to cut that down rationally. If there are only TFM files in the tree, then VMS will be as efficient as any other system in locating a particular file; if the tree has other files in it, then unacceptable delays may occur. It was really this area for which I was seeking clarification: is TDS defined in such a way that there is a TFM tree, a TEX/LaTeX tree, and so on, or are the trees conflated in some way? >> Whether the tree has irrelevant files depends, of course, on how well >> you specify the subtree to look at. It depends even more on what the TDS specifies!