[Mac OS X TeX] GUI for teTeX settings, etc.; ideas from NeXT?

[Gerben Wierda]

<x-flowed>On Thursday, November 15, 2001, at 08:38 , Troy Goodson wrote:

> Furthermore, it could handle *.ins and *.dtx files.  the first time I 
> saw one of these, I had no clue what I had.  I want to simply drop one 
> of these files on the aforementioned icon and have everything done for 
> me.  If there's a user manual, an alias (like a symlink) to a PDF file 
> for it could show up on my desktop!

Sadly, the docstrip stuff is not standardized and often you need to 
follow specific instructions in a readme to be able to compile tex 
packages from docstrip sources and install. There are also no 
standardized places, nor standardized items to do. There are only a few 
who at least upgrade properly by locating existig instances first.

That is the reason why I do these things by hand, and then add them to 
my distribution, to spare other people the setup.

> I envision a TeXShop preference window (or some such) that displays 
> this little icon that I can drop stuff on have the "right thing" done.

My guess is that this is impossible. One could do something simple, but 
one could then end up with something that has unexpected and *very* hard 
to debug effects (like having multiple instances of packages around, 
where some are complete and others aren't, etc). Furthermore, since the 
main trees are sysadmin trees, that would mean having to open those up 
or other even worse security risks (that is the disadvantage of a real 
multi-user unix system underneath, you have to take security very 
seriously).

G


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