[OS X TeX] MacTeX - a few questions

[Roussanka Loukanova]

Hi,

On Sat, 24 Feb 2007, Richard Koch wrote:
...
>> A few questions nevertheless:
>> 
>> **** I found out that the folder Applications/TeX is not owned by myself 
>> but by the system. The account I am using is an administrator account, but 
>> still I am not allowed to modify the content of Applications/TeX. Is this 
>> how it should be? If yes - why?
>
> I can now explain this. Thanks to Roussanka Loukanova for providing the 
> crucial information.

Well, Bruno has been leading me last days, so just everything  came in 
conjunction with that work... See more detail:

>
> MacTeX-2007 sets the permissions and owner of /Applications/TeX to
>
> 	drwxrwxr-x    8 root  admin     272 Feb 24 09:45 TeX
>
> so users in the admin group can modify the contents. Thus Daniel's problem 
> wasn't caused by MacTeX.
>
> Instead, it was caused by i-Installer when it installed gwTeX. Gerben 
> installs a small optional application in /Applications/TeX during this 
> installation. Just now I blew away /Applications/TeX and /usr/local/gwTeX and 
> reinstalled using i-Installer; sure enough, the new TeX folder had 
> permissions
>
> 	drwxr-xr-x.
>
> MacTeX doesn't change the permissions of /Applications/TeX if it already 
> exists. The MacTeX package for gwTeX doesn't install anything in 
> /Applications/TeX. Thus I conjecture that everyone reporting this permissions 
> problem used i-Installer to obtain gwTeX sometime in the past.

This was the case on my MacBook Pro:

1. Installed 1.1 MacAdditions + 1.2 gwTeX + 1.3 TeXLive-2006;
    1.4 regular updates

2. Uninstalling everything + Deleting /Applications/TeX +
    Uninstalling gwTeX + i-Installer

3. Carefully followed the order:

    3.1 Installing i-Installer, gwTeX via i-Installer + the
        additional i-packages (following the order recommended about
        the mid of Gerben's description at:
        <http://ii2.sourceforge.net/tex-index.html>
BTW, this is one of the most  useful descriptions of TeX that I've being 
following in the last years.

    3.2 MacTeX Additions + TeXLive-2007
    3.3 Double-checking up the i-Installer and via it the other 
i-Packages (just in case, because MacTeX Additions adds up
i-Installer + etc too, and I was never sure how that summed up).

4. regular updates

5. few days ago:
    Uninstalling MacAdditions + TeXLive-2007

6. But, during and after (5), I forgot to make sure if the directory 
/Applications/TeX was removed by the Uninstallation or not, and what were 
the permissions: most like all that existed as it were after (3).

7. Installed mactex.tar.gz from
   <http://www.tug.org/~koch/NewPackages.html>

8. Updated gwTeX

9. Problems with gwTeX for the Bulgarian language package bgtex-v3:
gwTeX could not place the external fonts grmn* where it was supposed to:
/private/var/tmp/texfonts, but would put them into the local directory of 
the example.tex file. (I tested this within bgtex-v3 and withing another 
directory external to bgtex-v3, but at the same directory tree level.)

Bruno worked with me on that, as posted on the list, and guessed, 
properly, that there was a permission problem. Bruno abandoned my efforts, 
but I continued on my own looking around for permissions :) I used the 
Disc Utility to check up and repair permissions (I'll write separately 
about this.)

10. Dick came up into the story and suggested what he did himself. 
I did the following, as ordered:

10.1 Deleted
sudo rm -rf  /Applications/TeX 
10.2 Deleted /usr/local/gwTeX
10.3 Kept /usr/local/texlive (for the additional bgtex-v3)
10.4 Installed MacTeX-2007 package from <http://www.tug.org/mactex/> (with 
everything in it).
10.5 Installed gwTeX with i-Installer.
10.6 the fix in gwTeX and TeXLive-07 for the beamer

The permissions are fixed as Dick wanted them

drwxrwxr-x   46 root  admin  1564 Feb 24 21:50 Applications
drwxrwxr-x   8 root  admin  272 Feb 24 22:36 Applications/TeX

But also, magically: gwTeX generated and placed the grmn* fonts where it 
is supposed to, "/private/var/tmp/texfonts/", not in the local directory 
of example1.tex  (bgtex and tests).

Roussanka

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