[OS X TeX] iInstaller and manually installed components

[Gerben Wierda]

On 29 Nov 2004, at 17:10, Stephan Hochhaus wrote:

> Heya,
>
> since I have to install TeX on a machine that also needs to have 
> ImageMagik in a 6.x version I would like to know if any of you have 
> ever tried to use Gerben's distribution with some manually installed 
> components (such as ImageMagik, Ghostscript or Freetype). 
> Theoretically I might just have to adjust some paths but I have never 
> tried to mix i-Installer and darwinports (which is going to install 
> ImageMagik).
> I could install both, since hd space is no problem, but I'd like to 
> keep only one version of a program lyig around (afterall, this *is* a 
> production system). Any experiences on mixing manually or via 
> darwinports/fink installed packages with gwTeX? Will it work out of 
> the box?

The design philosophy behind my packages is that they are a vehicle for 
installing, but not a 'closed world'. E.g. if you install ImageMagick 
in its default location (which is /usr/local), any i-Package requiring 
the ImageMagick dependency will detect that ImageMagick is available 
and go ahead. If you are using non-standard locations (like Fink's /sw) 
you can even tell the i-Package install that needs but cannot find 
ImageMagick to go ahead.

i-Installer is an install tool with some hooks for dependencies, but it 
assumes just what you want to do now: some people will want to install 
the latest from source. This way, even when I have not updated, the 
whole system will not crumble immediately. It is a robustness decision 
for my package library. They can be out of date, but that does not mean 
the whole collection is immediately out of date.

Of course, the other solution is notofying me that ImageMagick has been 
updated. A make and upload here generally takes little tim as the whole 
thing is automated.

G

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