[OS X TeX] MacTeX - a few questions

[Richard Koch]

Folks,

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

> Dear list,
>
> ... for the MacTeX-release

> 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?

I can now explain this. Thanks to Roussanka Loukanova for providing  
the crucial information.

MacTeX-2007 sets the permissions and owner of /Applications/TeX to

	drwxrwxr-x    8 root  admin     272 Feb 24 09:45 TeX

so users in the admin group can modify the contents. Thus Daniel's  
problem wasn't caused by MacTeX.

Instead, it was caused by i-Installer when it installed gwTeX. Gerben  
installs a small optional application in /Applications/TeX during  
this installation. Just now I blew away /Applications/TeX and /usr/ 
local/gwTeX and reinstalled using i-Installer; sure enough, the new  
TeX folder had permissions

	drwxr-xr-x.

MacTeX doesn't change the permissions of /Applications/TeX if it  
already exists. The MacTeX package for gwTeX doesn't install anything  
in /Applications/TeX. Thus I conjecture that everyone reporting this  
permissions problem used i-Installer to obtain gwTeX sometime in the  
past.

Dick
koch at math.uoregon.edu



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