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(kpathsea.info)History

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History
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  (This section is for those people who are curious about how the
library came about.)  (If you like to read historical accounts of
software, we urge you to seek out the GNU Autoconf manual and the
"Errors of TeX" paper by Don Knuth, published in `Software--Practice and
Experience' 19(7), July 1989.)

  [Karl writes.]  My first ChangeLog entry for Web2c seems to be
February 1990, but I may have done some work before then.  In any case,
Tim Morgan and I were jointly maintaining it for a time.  (I should
mention here that Tim had made Web2c into a real distribution long
before I had ever used it or even heard of it, and Tom Rokicki did the
original implementation.  I was using `pxp' and `pc' on VAX 11/750's
and the hot new Sun 2 machines.)

  It must have been later in 1990 and 1991 that I started working on
`TeX for the Impatient'. Dvips, Xdvi, Web2c, and the GNU fontutils
(which I was also writing at the time) all used different environment
variables, and, more importantly, had different bugs in their path
searching. This became extremely painful, as I was stressing everything
to the limit working on the book.  I also desperately wanted to
implement subdirectory searching, since I couldn't stand putting
everything in one big directory, and also couldn't stand having to
explicitly specify `cm', `pandora', ... in a path.

  In the first incarnation, I just hacked separately on each
program--that was the original subdirectory searching code in both Xdvi
and Dvips, though I think Paul Vojta has completely rewritten Xdvi's
support by now.  That is, I tried to go with the flow in each program,
rather than changing the program's calling sequences to conform to
common routines.

  Then, as bugs inevitably appeared, I found I was fixing the same thing
three times (Web2c and fontutils were always sharing code, since I
maintained those--there was no Dvipsk or Xdvik or Dviljk at this
point).  After a while, I finally started sharing source files.  They
weren't yet a library, though.  I just kept things up to date with shell
scripts.  (I was developing on a 386 running ISC 2.2 at the time, and so
didn't have symbolic links.  An awful experience.)

  The ChangeLogs for Xdvik and Dvipsk record initial releases of those
distributions in May and June 1992.  I think it was because I was tired
of the different configuration strategies of each program, not so much
because of the path searching.  (Autoconf was being developed by David
MacKenzie and others, and I was adapting it to TeX and friends.)

  I started to make a separate library that other programs could link
with on my birthday in April 1993, according to the ChangeLog.  I don't
remember exactly why I finally took the time to make it a separate
library; a conversation with david zuhn that initiated it.  Just seemed
like it was time.

  Dviljk got started in March 1994 after I bought a Laserjet 4.
(Kpathsea work got suspended while Norm Walsh and I, with Gustaf
Neumann's help, implemented a way for TeX to get at all those neat
builtin LJ4 fonts ... such a treat to have something to typeset in
besides Palatino!)

  By spring of 1995, I had implemented just about all the path-searching
features in Kpathsea that I plan to, driven beyond my initial goals by
Thomas Esser and others.  I then started to integrate Web2c with
Kpathsea. After the release of a stable Web2c, I hope to be able to stop
development, and turn most of my attention back to making fonts for GNU.
(Always assuming Micros**t hasn't completely obliterated Unix by then,
or that software patents haven't stopped software development by anybody
smaller than a company with a million-dollar-a-year legal budget.  Which
is actually what I think is likely to happen, but that's another
story...)

  [Olaf writes.]  At the end of 1997, UNIX is still alive and kicking,
individuals still develop software, and Web2c development still
continues.  Karl had been looking for some time for someone to take up
part of the burden, and I volunteered.