[tldistro] Whether/how to ship tlmgr

[Norbert Preining]

Hi Ken,

> I noticed that Debian ships tlmgr but only allows it to run in user
> mode.  This rules out 'tlmgr paper', among other things.  I'm

There is a reason for this - tlmgr paper requires changes to the
formats and this cannot be easily done if there are not
write permissions, unless you start having format dumps in the
home directory of users, which I *strongly* advise against it.

I have tried to make all actions in tlmgr that do not need write
access to the main tree user-mode usable.

The patch you add is by itself surely not enough, as you need to 
make sure that the post actions (format rebuilds, maybe updmap.cfg
regeneration) are all done in the user's home dir...

> Does anyone see any problems with this?  What do other distros do?

As far as I see no other distro ships a working tlmgr, but I might
be wrong.

Norbert

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PREINING, Norbert                               http://www.preining.info
JAIST, Japan                                 TeX Live & Debian Developer
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