[OS X TeX] OS X TeX newbie needs help installing TeX on non-boot volume

[Rowland McDonnell]

> Here's a clue. Gerben has a day job. He does i-Installer and he  
> answers queries for free. If he did not answer your questions to your  
> satisfaction, you could have
> 
> 1. Offered to pay for his time

I could have done, but since he spent lots of time on me explaining why
I didn't want to do what I wanted to do and so on and so forth without
actually offering any actual help to speak of, I reckon that would have
been a waste of money.  Moreover, in the TeX world, people provide help
free because they want to or because they are being paid a fully
commercial rate - you think I'm paying a fully commercial consulting
rate for help with free software that's got documentation, a mailing
list, and is supposed to be easy to use?  That's insane!

On top of that, I'm buggered if I'm paying for LaTeX help given the
amount of time and code I personally have donated to the LaTeX community
over the years.

(I started using LaTeX in 1988.  No dvi previewer.  I turned into the
lab LaTeX bod because no-one else could be bothered and I wanted to `do
stuff'.  Nothing I did then was anything but embarrassingly crude - and
I'm not sure things have changed much, but still.  I've not stopped
offering any help I can to anyone who asks.  I've not been able to offer
much help in recent years due to illness so my CTAN packages are
horribly out of date and one at least ought to be put out of its
misery.)

> 2. Tried to figure out why he didn't -- for instance, because what  
> you were asking for would have all sorts of unwanted consequences  
> that would lead to a a long-drawn and not very productive discussion,  
> as ended up happening.

Well, I tried that - of course.  The thing is that I couldn't figure it
out and he wouldn't explain things when I asked.

> Now for a bit of technical advice: if you want a TeX distro that can  
> live elsewhere, use the tetex package provided by Fink, which puts  
> all of its files on its own directory hierarchy /sw, which could be  
> placed on a different partition as you want.

Thanks - I might well take a look at that.   I'd need to install Fink
and Fink Commander and learn about both of them beforehand which would
be quite a lot of work.  I was hoping that the i-installer route would
work out easier.

Rowland.
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