[OS X TeX] MacTeX 2014 TeX Distribution panel broken under Mac OSX Yosemite RC

[Richard Koch]

John,

I'm traveling and won't be back to deal with things for three or four days.
Let me add just a little to Herb's reply.

1) I installed previous betas of Yosemite on a fresh partition and used MacTeX to install
TeX. That worked fine.

Unfortunately, I didn't try the update route, with MacTeX already installed. You report a one hour
delay installing this way. Our other user reported a 12 hour delay. Clearly we need to investigate,
and probably warn users that it is easier to uninstall TeX Live, update, and then do a clean install of
MacTeX.

2) The author of the TeX Dist Pref Pane is aware of a problem, but I don't know whether
he is working on a solution.

However, I constructed a similar Pref Pane, which you can get at

	http://pages.uoregon.edu/koch/LocalTeX.zip

This zip gives you a pref pane, a pdf explaining it, and full source. This pane doesn't
change any data used by the original pane, and can be used in conjunction with it or
instead of it. The one disadvantage is that it puts uses as symbolic link to the binaries

	~/Library/TeX/LocalTeX/texbin

Thus the disadvantage is that you must reconfigure your GUI apps, but the advantages are
that

	a) Apple sometimes removes /usr/texbin, but doesn't remove items in ~/Library

	b) This location is user writeable, so users can have independent default TeX
	distributions

Dick Koch
koch at math.uoregon.edu

PS: Did you already have the MacTeX install package, or did you download it again. I ask
because Apple has changed signing methods and I haven't yet tested if our packages needs
to be resigned.


On Oct 5, 2014, at 10:47 AM, John Minter <jrminter at gmail.com> wrote:

> I just upgraded my MacBook Pro from Mavericks to the Mac OSX 10.10 Yosemite release candidate. My son had no issues and it gave us access to some iCloud features that were rolled out on our iPhones and iPads, so I gave it a try. I ran into a couple of MacTeX 2014 issues (and found workarounds) that I thought I should report since the Yosemite release is scheduled soon (Oct 16 IIRC).
> 
> 1. The TeX distribution panel is broken. It shows up in the System Preferences but when you click on the panel, it gives an error message: "Could not load preference panel."
> 
> 2. Because this was an upgrade install, MacTeX was already symlinked into /usr/texbin. I am not sure whether that would be a case with a clean install. I should that the OS upgrade hung for well over an hour at the 2 min left point. Turns out it was copying files from /usr/local (TexLive and homebrew) from a recovery partition back to /usr/local. Cmd-L  lets you see this in the log. I mention this because I suspect those of you who do upgrade installs will likely encounter this and might be concerned (as I was)...
> 
> 3. I tried a re-install of MacTeX 2014 and there was no error from the installer. I updated the packages and checked the preference pane again. Again it failed to load.
> 
> 4. I use RStudio to process Sweave documents that embed R chunks with LaTeX. RStudio could not find the LaTeX distribution. TeXworks could, but I had configured it previously. It turns out that this Yosemite beta/RC has a known problem passing environment variables to processes. The apps never read the bash environment from .profile but one used to be able to use a csh syntax and set environment variables in /etc/lauchd.conf that many apps read/find. This does not now work for RStudio or another application (ImageJ) that I use. I did find a workaround - I can set the path and environment variables directly via launchctl from a bash shell script. Here are a couple of lines from the script in case it helps someone
> 
> # fix-yos.sh
> launchctl setenv PATH /usr/texbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/opt/X11/bin
> launchctl setenv GIT_HOME /Users/jrminter/git 
> 
> I run the fix-yos.sh from terminal prior to launching a problem application and my applications work.
> 
> Hope this helps others.
> 
> John Minter
> 
> 
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