Although the basic features in Kpathsea can be used for any type of path searching, it came about (like all libraries) with a specific application in mind: I wrote Kpathsea specifically for TeX system programs. I had been struggling with the programs I was using (Dvips, Xdvi, and TeX itself) having slightly different notions of how to specify paths; and debugging was painful, since no code was shared.
Therefore, Kpathsea provides some TeX-specific formats and features. Indeed, many of the supposedly generic path searching features were provided because they seemed useful in that conTeXt (font lookup, particularly).
Kpathsea provides a standard way to search for files of any of the supported file types; glyph fonts are a bit different than all the rest. Searches are based solely on filenames, not file contents--if a GF file is named `cmr10.600pk', it will be found as a PK file.
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