[OS X TeX] tlmgr

Dr. Clea F. Rees cfrees at imapmail.org
Fri Oct 17 02:01:58 CEST 2008


The MacTeX wiki currently recommends running:
 	sudo tlmgr update --all

Question: is there some reason to prefer this to:
 	sudo -H tlmgr update --all
?

If not, I suggest the recommendation should be changed as the former
can fail in cases where the latter will not. For example, when I last
ran the former, it failed to regenerate two formats but it would have
succeeded had I used the latter. This is because configuration files in
my personal tex tree screwed up the generation of two formats I've never
actually used. This could be especially problematic on multi-user
systems.

It seems more appropriate for the system-wide formats to not depend on
user-specific settings in the personal tex tree of the user who happens
to update the installation. If a user wants to generate personal
formats, that's fine but should presumably be done with fmtutil rather
than fmtutil-sys which is what tlmgr calls.

Thoughts?

- cfr



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