[OS X TeX] MacTeX - a few questions

[Richard Koch]

On Feb 24, 2007, at 2:04 AM, Daniel Becker wrote:

> Dear list,
>
> first of all: Congratulations for the MacTeX-release to all who  
> deserve credit (quite a few, I guess) - it is really impressive.  
> All looks very much how it should on a mac. It feels as if one  
> could tell a newbie to download the two dmg's (MacTeX.dmg and  
> MacTeXextras.dmg), use them and ready you are with a software setup  
> that is very much up to date, including GUIs.

I'm happy to read this, since it is exactly what we had in mind.  
Thanks go to Wendy McKay, who pushed for this at TUG, to Jonathan  
Kew, who whipped out the first install package in one productive  
overnight session, to Herbert Schulz, the editor of MacTeX, to Gerben  
Wierda and Jerome Laurens for the TeX Distributions data structure,  
and to the astonishing TeX community.
>

> A few questions nevertheless:
>
> **** I found out that the folder Applications/TeX is not owned by  
> myself but by the system. The account I am using is an  
> administrator account, but still I am not allowed to modify the  
> content of Applications/TeX. Is this how it should be? If yes - why?

This is puzzling and it doesn't happen here. I can add and remove  
programs from /Applications/TeX. The permissions, owner, and group  
of /Applications/TeX should be those of /Applications, namely

	drwxrwxr-x    8 root  admin

Do you have something different?

>
> **** I also saw that during the install, I had older versions of  
> BibDesk and TeXShop in Applications/TeX, but later on, they  
> disappeared. This means that the installer checks which System I am  
> using.

Yes, the installer adds different versions of LaTeXiT, BibDesk, and  
TeXShop for 10.3 and 10.4 because the most recent versions of these  
three programs require 10.4.
>
> **** I used to install gwtex in expert mode. There where many  
> decisions I had to take. Am I correct that mactex installs  
> everything with the idea of "you get everything" and if if I feel  
> the need for example for full font-inclusion, I run the configure  
> stage via iinstaller that is still used to take care of my  
> installation in the background? But where a the i-packages for  
> mactex/texlive2007?

In MacTeX-2007, i-Installer is included because Ghostscript,  
ImageMagick, and the Font Utilities are directly from Gerben.  
However, i-Installer cannot be used to upgrade or configure TeX Live  
2007. It won't try, looking instead for /usr/local/gwTeX. Note that on

	www.tug.org/~koch/NewPackages

there is a MacTeX package for gwTeX; this will eventually move to the  
permanent mactex page. This package installs Gerben's release, and  
then i-Installer can be used to configure and upgrade it. Of course  
you can also install gwTeX using i-Installer (even after you have TeX  
Live if you wish).

>
> Maybe it is an misunderstanding and it is not possible to configure  
> mactex as I was used to with gwtex? Is this then one of the reasons  
> to use gwtex instead of mactex/texlive?

Yes.

It would be wonderful if someone knowledgeable would write a small  
GUI configuration tool for TeX Live.

Dick
koch at math.uoregon.edu

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