[OS X TeX] Installing packages not available as iInstaller-Packages

[Roussanka Loukanova]

Hi,

On Wed, 28 Feb 2007, Bruno Voisin wrote:

> Le 27 févr. 07 à 19:14, Axel E. Retif a écrit :
>
>> The advantage of installing in ~/Library/texmf/tex/latex/

Installing a package in

~/Library/texmf/tex/latex/

may have disadvantages in cases like this:

1. a style package (or something like that) is already in TeXLive-07, but 
not in gwTeX, and
2. the user typesets a file.tex which uses that package, while TeXLive-07 
is the active distribution.

In such situations, TeXLive-07 would use the copy in 
~/Library/texmf/tex/latex/ instead its own one. To prevent this, one 
needs temporarily to move that style out of ~/Library/texmf/tex/latex/. 
Then, when the user switches to gwTeX, they have to move the style back 
to ~/Library/texmf/tex/latex/, etc...

I myself have been getting into such situations with some 
linguistics/logic styles.

What Bruno suggested, and Gerben too, as described by Bruno again now, 
would certainly resolve such troubles.

Roussanka

>>, as Herb Schulz 
>> suggested, is that if you have more than one current distribution (as I do: 
>> gwTeX-2003-2005, gwTeX and TeXLive-2007), you just install in one place and 
>> any active distro will see your packages.
>
> I once suggested 
> <http://tug.org/pipermail/macostex-archives/2007-January/027996.html> that it 
> would be nice to adjust the TeXDist structure so as to have one single real 
> folder /Library/TeX/Local, inside which an admin user could put local 
> additions to the existing texmf trees, and then turn the various local texmf 
> trees from each distribution, as defined by the variable TEXMFLOCAL from 
> texmf.cnf, namely:
>
> - For TeXLive, /usr/local/texlive/texmf-local
>
> - For gwTeX, /usr/local/gwTeX/texmf.pkgs
>
> into symlinks to that /Library/TeX/Local. Alas, that message of mine was too 
> long and too convoluted as usual, and I doubt it read much.
>
> Advantages would be that you could manipulate this local texmf folder 
> directly from the Finder (create subfolders, move files, copy files, etc.), 
> without having to resort to the command line. And that you could maintain a 
> single local texmf tree (i) for all distributions installed on a given Mac 
> and (ii) for all the users of this Mac.
>
> Gerben's answer 
> <http://tug.org/pipermail/macostex-archives/2007-January/028015.html> seemed 
> to suggest that this is indeed possible and does not even require symlinks. 
> Instead, a simple edition of the texmf.cnf of each distribution would do the 
> trick. Namely, edit the lines:
>
> - For TeXLive, in /usr/local/texlive/2007/texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf,
>
> 	TEXMFLOCAL=$SELFAUTOPARENT/../texmf-local
>
> - For gwTeX, in /usr/local/gwTeX/texmf.cnf,
>
> 	TEXMFLOCAL = $SELFAUTOPARENT/texmf.local
>
> to simply:
>
> 	TEXMFLOCAL=/Library/TeX/Local
>
> Alas, I did not attempt that modification, as (i) I wasn't sure to have 
> properly understood what Gerben meant and (ii) I was afraid to break the 
> TeXDist structure by doing so.
>
> In any case, the above couldn't work for teTeX, given the local directory for 
> it is /usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.local which is not only TEXMFLOCAL but 
> also VARTEXMF, implying that, with a unique /Library/TeX/Local, teTeX would 
> not only read its content but also put the generated files such as 
> psfonts.map and *fmt files inside it, which would break gwTeX and TeXLive.
>
> Bruno
>
>
>
>
>
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>

-- 
Roussanka
------------------------------------------------
Roussanka Loukanova
Computational Linguistics
Dept. of Linguistics and Philology
Uppsala University
P.Box 635, Uppsala 751 26, Sweden

Tel:   +46 18 471 1342 (office)
        +46 18 750 0340
Email: rloukano at stp.lingfil.uu.se
URL:   http://stp.ling.uu.se/~rloukano/
--------------------------------------------------

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