[OS X TeX] TeX Live 2015 and MacTeX-2015

[Richard Koch]

Alan,

When users upgrade to El Capitan, the link /usr/texbin will be removed.
This is not a new story; it has often happened in the past. An advantage
of switching to /Library/TeX/texbin is that Apple will not remove this
link during updates.

I recommend that users install either MacTeX-2015 or BasicTeX-2015
now. Each of them creates both /usr/texbin and
/Library/TeX/texbin. Then gradually over the summer, I recommend
that users reconfigure their GUI apps. TeXShop 3.52 will handle
this automatically, but TeX Live Utility, LaTeXiT, and BibDesk currently
need to be reconfigured.

After this, users are free to use TeX Live 2015 or earlier distributions.
So someone in the middle of a book project might well decide to switch
back to TeX Live 2013 after installing BasicTeX-2015.
It will work today with this new configuration,
and the update to El Capitan will require no changes whatever.

Herb Schulz has written a document about how to reconfigure GUI
apps. It is linked from the El Capitan paragraph on the middle of the
downloading page at

	tug.org/mactex <http://tug.org/mactex>

The last part of this document explains how to create the link
/Library/TeX/texbin directly without installing BasicTeX-2015. The
disadvantage is that further steps are required to make the shell work,
whereas if a user installs BasicTeX-2015, then everything including
the shell will work now and will continue to work after the upgrade
to El Capitan.

Dick Koch


> On Jul 15, 2015, at 8:11 AM, Alan Munn <amunn at gmx.com> wrote:
> 
> (Apologies if this is a duplicate; the first version didn’t seem to make it.)
> 
> On Jun 23, 2015, at 1:04 PM, Richard Koch <koch at uoregon.edu> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On the other hand, the change to a replacement for /usr/texbin is essential
>> for El Capitan, and I do hope that /Library/TeX/texbin will be accepted
>> without discussion, since it will affect the configuration of lots of
>> GUI programs.
> 
> Hi Dick, first off, thanks as always for all the work you do on MacTeX. It’s clear that TL 2015 is now perfectly prepared for El Capitan and its prohibition on writing to /usr directly. Do you know what will happen to users who have pre-TL 2015 systems but who upgrade to El Capitan?
> 
> I can see two possibilities: 
> 
> A. everything that used to work still works, because /usr is not touched
> B.  older distributions will fail to work at all because /usr/texbin isn’t there anymore after the upgrade
> 
> Obviously if the answer is A, then there’s no potential problems for older distributions on newer OS.
> 
> But if the answer is B, is there a simple solution to allow users with older distributions to keep using those distributions with the new link?  
> 
> If it’s just a matter of making a new link, a clickable script might help a lot of the more Terminal-phobic folk.
> 
> Alan
> 
> 
> 
>> 
>> But as to where /Library/TeX/texbin points next, I really don’t care!
>> 
>> Dick Koch
>> 
>> 
>>> On Jun 21, 2015, at 1:20 PM, jfbu <jfbu at free.fr> wrote:
>>> 
>>> a bit of my context: the extras in my installation are from MacTeX 2014,
>>> but recently as I had already the pretest of TeXLive 2015 installed,
>>> when official version was released I did only a few adjustments
>>> but did not download MacTeX 2015, (I know I am missing some bounties
>>> like extra support in Ghostscript for far east languages)
>>> thus my experience with TeX Dist Preference Pane might be at odds
>>> with the latest version.
>>> 
>>> on my system /usr/texbin was a symlink to
>>> 
>>> /Library/TeX/Distributions/Programs/texbin
>>> 
>>> the latter itself a symlink
>>> 
>>> Anticipating the possible upgrade to El Capitan next fall,
>>> I thus suppressed /usr/texbin symlink, then created the similar one
>>> in /Library/TeX/ and updated accordingly /etc/paths.d/TeX
>>> 
>>> This process left me with two mutually contradictory questions:
>>> 
>>> 1) if the Programs/ repertory is to serve anything, shouldn't
>>> /Library/TeX/texbin be a symlink to it rather than to
>>> sub-element Programs/texbin ?
>>> 
>>> 2) as I see nothing in this Distributions/Programs/, so it
>>> should not hurt if I define the /Library/TeX/texbin symlink
>>> to point directly to
>>> /Library/TeX/Distributions/.DefaultTeX/Contents/Programs/texbin
>>> which is the thing which the TeXDist Preference Pane updates
>>> whenever one uses it to switch distributions
>>> 
>> 
>> 
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> 
> --
> Alan Munn
> alanbmunn at gmx.com
> 
> -- 
> Alan Munn
> amunn at gmx.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ----------- Please Consult the Following Before Posting -----------
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> 

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