[OS X TeX] How do I tell MacTeX about my user-install of Live TeX?

[Maloney, Christopher (NIH/NLM/NCBI) [C]]

I posted this question on the TeX SX site here, http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/229954/how-do-i-tell-mactex-about-my-user-install-of-live-tex, and they suggested that I send the question to this mailing list.

This question is similar to "How do I set up MacTeX so admin rights aren't necessary?" (http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/3744/how-do-i-set-up-mactex-so-admin-rights-arent-necessary).

I have a Mac at work, and the sysadmins won't give me write permissions to /usr/local/texlive. So, per the instructions in "Is there any way to have a LaTeX compiler on a Mac without root access?” (http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/106113/is-there-any-way-to-have-a-latex-compiler-on-a-mac-without-root-access), I installed my own user-specific version of TeX Live, at ~/Library/texlive/2014, and it is working fine.

Now, how do I tell MacTeX's "TeX Distribution" utility (in System Preferences) about this installation of TeX Live, so that I can use MacTeX with it? If I need admin rights to do this, it would be okay -- I can ask our sysadmins to do this if it's a one-time thing. What I don't want is to be tied to asking them, for example, every time I want to install a new package.

The comments to my question on SX indicate that there is a way to do this by tweaking the symlinks under /Library/TeX. I’ve had a look there, and these symlinks see pretty complicated! Is there an easy way (maybe a script) that will set up these symlinks automatically, if I just tell the sysadmins to run it for me, giving them the location of my local install?


Thanks!

Chris Maloney