[AUCTeX] Complex document and style loading

[Pierre Lorenzon]

Hi,

I like complexe LaTeX documents to be organized in directories
and subdirectories but it seem to generate problems with
auctex. Anyway I particularly like functionalities provided by
auctex that's why I am very disappointed that something goes
wrong in this case. The problems appear in style loading.

Let's take an example : The master directory (let's  name it
..../MyDoc) contains the master file MyDoc.tex. 

It contains as well a directory Chapter-1 containing all files
corresponding to chapter one of the document and in particular
a file Chapter-1.tex. Hence there is an input command
\input{Chapter-1/Chapter-1} in the MyDoc.tex file. 

In the subdirectory Chapter-1 lives a file Section-1-1.tex as
well. The latter is called by Chapter-1.tex by the input
command \input{<fullpath>/MyDoc/Chapter-1/Section-1-1} Indeed
it seems that LaTeX does not understand relative pathes in such
circumstances. 

In Chapter-1.tex as weel as in Section-1-1.tex the TeX-master local
variable is set to "../MyDoc"  And in MyDoc it is obviously set
to t !

All style file (.el) created by auctex are placed in the
.../MyDoc/auto subdirectory i.e. MyDoc.el Chapter-1.el and
Section-1-1.el. 

When loading MyDoc.tex into emacs, MyDoc.el will correctly be
loaded. Since the latter requires Chapter-1 style the system
will try to load (somewhere) a Chapter-1.el file and will
success. But then Chapter-1 requires
"<fullpath>/MyDoc/Chapter-1/Section-1-1" style which will be
resolved and auctex will try to load (somewhere) a
Section-1-1.el file ! But it won't be able to determine where
to find it. 

After having investigate the code I found that the point is in
the TeX-load-style method where and expand-file-name command
does not return the suitable path ! Indeed it seems that this
command behave as if the current directory were
<fullpath>/MyDoc/Chapter-1 and then try to locate the auto
subdirectory in it and not in <fulpath>/MyDoc. 

To sum up, it looks like to me as if the way auctex stores the
.el file is not consistant with the way it tries to retrieve
them : anyway it might simpply append that I misunderstood
something ... If it is the case simply tell me ! (or let me
discover it !) otherwise if there is really a sort of bug I can
work to try to solve it but simply tell me again ! 

Regards

Pierre