[MetaTeX] Why kpathsea???

[skhilji at tampabay.rr.com]

Having absolutely no experience with kpathsea, please allow me to ask a dumb question.

I understand that kpathsea's job is to locate the path of a file in the TeX tree given just the filename.  In MetaTeX, the plan is to replace it with a C library that looks for files in some form of an archive.

Why wouldn't the following approach work?

*  Imagine that we have a very simple database of key-value pairs....the key, for example, cmr12.tfm poinits to /usr/local/texmf/some_path/cmr12.tfm.  All other keys are similar.

* These key-value pairs are stored in a database similar to qdb or berkeley db.

* One can then quicky find the paths by calling a database function

* A helper utility can then update this database when files are added or removed from the tree.

So what's the flaw in this approach?