[tex-live] Where is the root dir of my Tex Live installation

Scott Kostyshak skostysh at lyx.org
Tue Nov 19 01:00:08 CET 2013


On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 5:17 PM, Reinhard Kotucha
<reinhard.kotucha at web.de> wrote:
> On 2013-11-16 at 18:00:17 -0500, Scott Kostyshak wrote:
>
>  > On Sat, Nov 16, 2013 at 2:24 AM, Lars Madsen <daleif at imf.au.dk> wrote:
>  > > Sounds reasonable regarding the linking.
>  > >
>  > > The thing I'd like to see in TL is some script or what ever that
>  > > will take care if the equivs stuff (or how ever you are doing
>  > > that trick). There are many Ubuntu vanilla TL users, and most of
>  > > them find the equivs stuff confusing (even though, the recipe on
>  > > Tug.org is easy to follow)
>  >
>  > Yes, install-tl-ubuntu uses equivs. But as you say, it is a "trick"
>  > and it is not perfect so I don't think this trick belongs anywhere
>  > in the official TeX Live installation tools.

Hi Reinhard,

Thank you for the clarification and explanations.

> No, it's not a trick.  It's a tool which tells the Debian/Ubuntu
> package manager that a user prefers to maintain a particular package
> himself even if other packages depend on it.

I'm not claiming (I might have before and did not realize the
importance of making the distinction until you brought this up. Thank
you for that) that any use of equivs is a trick. I'm claiming that my
use of equivs in install-tl-ubuntu is a trick. And by "trick", I mean
something that mostly does the job but could have problems. For
example, the Debian control file I use to build with equivs is good
enough that no one has noticed problems, but I'm sure it is not
entirely correct. I'm sure I'm missing some packages (see
https://github.com/scottkosty/install-tl-ubuntu/issues/7) and that I
probably have some packages in there that are not equivalent to
installing the repo counterparts (equivalent meaning some parts of the
packages might not be installed, perhaps some Ubuntu-specific parts
for example).

> It's definitely a good thing.  On some other Linux systems I tried to
> remove the Type 1 fonts provided by Ghostscript because I wanted to
> maintain them myself.  Disk space was much more expensive these
> days. Their package managers assumed that Ghostscript is nothing worth
> without its fonts and thus removed Ghostscript too.  No problem so
> far, I could maintain Ghostscript at /usr/local as well.  But the
> package managers wiped out the whole /usr/share/doc tree because they
> assumed that everything therein is worthless without Ghostcript.  What
> a pain.

Good example.

> The equivs package avoids such problems.  It's not a dirty trick.

I don't think anyone here claimed that it was a "dirty" trick. I would
like to consider my use of it a "somewhat clean" trick :)

Scott

>
> You said:
>
>  > I don't think this trick belongs anywhere in the official TeX Live
>  > installation tools.
>
> Don't know what you mean with "official TeX Live installation tools".
> The equivs package is part of the Debian/Ubuntu package management
> system.  It can be mentioned in the TeX Live documentation but it
> can't be shipped with TeX Live for several reasons.
>
> Regards,
>   Reinhard
>
> --
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Reinhard Kotucha                                      Phone: +49-511-3373112
> Marschnerstr. 25
> D-30167 Hannover                              mailto:reinhard.kotucha at web.de
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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