[tex-live] sharing packages between texlive and miktex?

[Juergen Fenn]

"George N. White III" <gnwiii at gmail.com> writes:

> If you install the oberdiek package with mpm on linux, any existing
> pdfatfi (normally, a copy of pdfatfi.pl put in the bin directory) is
> not updated.  It is possible to get around this on *X by using a
> symbolic link to the following script:
>
> #! /bin/sh
> what=`echo $0 | sed 's at .*/@@'`
> p=`kpsewhich -format=texmfscripts $what.pl`
> { test -n "$p" && test -f "$p"; } \
>   || { echo "\`$what.pl' not found."; exit 1; }
> exec perl "$p" ${1+"$@"}
>
> This, however, may not be acceptable for security reasons.
> I'm not near a WIn32 machine, so I'm not sure how MiKTeX handles
> this, but it points to a key problem -- for a package manager to
> be effective, the distribution needs to have some mechanism to
> ensure that the "right" versions of scripts are being used.

In MiKTeX, some of these scripts are available as exe binaries in the
MiKTeX bin directory, while mostly Perl scripts are available as such,
requiring an external Perl system (not part of MiKTeX) and setting
PATH to the additional directories they are stored at by hand. Only
the MiKTeX bin directory is added to PATH in the installation
process. 

Regards,
Jürgen.