[OS X TeX] New TeX i-Packages release

[Gerben Wierda]

On Oct 14, 2005, at 10:13, Claus Gerhardt wrote:

> Thanks for the clarification. But why then isn't sudo utility-sys 
> (etc)  the default command run by i-Installer. This would correspond 
> to the old behaviour which didn't cause any headaches as far as I 
> know.

Well, it did not cause headaches because my previous texmf.cnf patched 
a couple of variables such that updmap behaved lik eupdmap-sys. 
Starting with TL2005 I decided to support the possibility of users 
using updmap for personal configuration. That meant
1. Removing the patch in texmf.cnf
2. Rewriting the phases of TeX-related i-packages such that your have a 
choice between per-system (sudo -H -u root updmap-sys) and per-user 
(sudo -H -u user updmap) config.

It turned out that this was in the end not really doable because of the 
complexity of all the different combinations of TL versions, i-Packages 
and their workings, etc. Don't ask, there was too much that was 
becoming a jungle. Hence, I decided to move away from per-user and only 
support per-system. But I do still offer the possibility to use the 
per-user on the command line. So I cannot make updmap behave as 
updmap-sys again, or I'll lose the personal option for all users on the 
system.

So, I had to run updmap-sys (read "any utility-sys") in the i-Package. 
Now, this needs to work in two cases: also when the user decides to 
install in a non-sysadmin location and turns the authentication off. 
The TeX i-Package is relocatable and you can decide to install without 
authentication (which is probably one possibility that has not figured 
in your thoughts). When you do that, there seemed to be a problem (but 
there probably wasn't, so I *may* have made a misjudgement here) 
related to locations. Besides, I decided that it is cleaner to have a 
system-wide install be configurable by any user with privileges without 
differences in the outcome. And also, making sure the local texmf tree 
is not involved will save me a large portion of support requests 
because many of those are because of stuff in ~/Library/texmf.

In all, I decided to go for the pure-system route. It is a difficult 
decision. The new way is cleaner. But also slightly incompatible. If 
you want to use ~/Library/texmf for configuration, you need the command 
line. Otherwise, install stuff in texmf.local.

Having the config stuff in ~/Library//texmf and the outcome in 
texmf.local is also confusing and error prone. That made me decide for 
the cleaner setup. But there are arguments for the other way too.

G

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