[OS X TeX] slightly OT: sharing TeX installation possible?

[Thomas A.Schmitz]

OK, this may be slightly off-topic, but it continues something we were 
talking about recently: If I compare a TeX installation on a linux and 
an OS X box, which files are really different? I assume that the 
compiled binaries under teTeX/bin/ will only work for one platform 
(that's why the directories have these explicit names like 
"powerpc-unknown-linux-gnu" or "powerpc-apple-darwin6.8," right?), but 
what about the rest of the teTeX directory? I was wondering since 
Gerben's setup is so incredibly convenient and powerful. I spent a good 
deal of Sunday trying to install the latest teTeX beta on my (gentoo) 
linux system. In the end, I succeeded, but it was a long process, and I 
still haven't installed all the goodies that come with Gerben's 
texmf.gwtex etc. So I was wondering if it wasn't possible to just share 
my teTeX branch between my OS X and my linux partition, like put a 
symlink into linux/usr/local and have both set of binaries under 
teTeX/bin, with the $PATH variable in both systems pointing to the 
right one. Does anybody have any ideas about this, or even had 
experience with similar setups?

And, to resume something that was also mentioned on the list: it is 
indeed quite amazing to use TeX on linux from time to time. Latex 
documents, even long ones, compile in no time at all, even ConTeXt 
(which I use more than LaTeX) is relatively speedy. It is a bit 
embarrassing for our favorite OS...

Thanks

Thomas

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