[OS X TeX] OSX-ifying TeX even more

[Roberto Avanzi]

I suffered from a partial HD crash, so I replaced myself my PB HD,
put the old one in a external case, and used the Migration Assistant
to bring all my data and applications to the new disk - but things
like TeX and Developer Tools were NOT migrated as they are not in
Users, Applications or in the configurations files. So I had to
reinstall them separately.

One idea to make TeX more compatible with some assumptions made
by OS X would be to put the texlive files and all the binaries
somewhere in /Users/Shared -- the Migration Assistant would then
migrate the whole.  At the moment /usr/texbin is in the PATH, the
TeXDist Preference panel could them prompt the user to change
the shell $PATH accordingly and link some directories in order to
enable the tools to find the files.  Everything would be transparent
and require no more, no less effort from the users than the current
situation.  The path could even look like
/Users/Shared/MacTeX.bundle/Contents/
and then everything inside: binaries, tex files, formats,
configuration... we need to set some shell environment variables
anyway... the bundle could have its own icon, and have TeXShop as
associated applications.  Double clicking on it could open
TeXShop and have it set all the variables to make it the default
installation. We could then have more bundles, like
  /Users/Shared/teTeX.bundle
  /Users/Shared/gwTeX.bundle
  /Users/Shared/TeXLive-MTS-2005.bundle
  /Users/Shared/TeXLive-2007.bundle

Pro and con anyone?

  cheers
   Roberto


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