[tex-live] Distributing Customised TeX Live

[Fabrice Popineau]

> TEXMFTEMP is a new one to me.  Is this where temporary fonts etc are
> written to?  If it is, I believe some long-term headaches may just be
> getting solved.

I have introduced this variable so that mktex* could work in a safe
place (safe wrt to NT/2K/XP permissions) without interfering with 'user'
TEMP/TMP whatever variable. The basic idea is as follows. If you use
some arbitrary location (c:/tmp for example, but possibly ~/tmp !) to
generate fonts, you are not sure that this location is readable by
everyone. It may happen that when files (pk files for example) are moved
they keep the permissions they heve been given when they were
created. In this case, you end up with some file (cmr10.600pk for
example) existing on the system, but readable only by the user that
generated it. Weird, because if a second user logs on the same machine,
tries to use tex, mktexpk will try to generate the font again and fail
to do so because it won't be able to install it. 

To oslve that, TeXSetup.exe used to create a 
"c:/program files/texlive/temp" directory and make sure that the right
permissions are setup on this directory. Then at kpathsea
initialization, TMP and TEMP env vars are overriden by the TEXMFTEMP
value. This way, I was sure that the temp files were machine wide
readable before being moved. Possibly there are other ways to solve the
issue.

Not sure if this is clear for everyone however.

Fabrice

clear, but 
>> Not that I've seen (I'd love to have one).  The TL install doc talks
>> somewhat about a central installation on Unix.  I can't write
>> anything about Windows mechanisms, though, lacking first-hand
>> experience ...

> I don't have much experience either as I tend to install through unix.
> However it is used through linux.  I'll see if I can pull together
> what little I know and stick it up somewhere.  If anyone else has
> helpful things to add (eg best way to add ghostscript utils) please
> post it.

>> It's not about distribution, but I'll mention that Fabrice did write
>> something about installing the TL'04 binaries on Windows:
>> http://tug.org/texlive/windows.html

> This is also helpful,

> Thanks Gavin

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-- 
Fabrice Popineau
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