[tex-live] private "tl-bin" directory?

[Frank Küster]

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

> Hartmut's post shows it is not only WIn32 where there are clashes
> between TL and other executables, so it is worth implementing a
> general strategy to reduce such conflicts.

I'm not sure that the problems on Windows and Linux/UNIX distributions
are really of the same type, but I haven't followed the windows-related
discussions. 

> Certain names should be reserved for system-specific use.  Unlike
> common programs like "ls"and "rm", these would abe allowed to have
> system-specific behaviour.  Certainly "install" would be in the list,
> and "install-info" would be a likely candidate.   

What do you mean with "system" here?  A particular machine, an operating
system? 

> In the absence of
> such rules, Debian should use absolute paths in package installers,

It is an established Debian policy (and a "must" clause IIRC) to *not*
use absolute paths in install scripts.  And this is indeed very useful;
for example it's easy to replace a script for debugging, without messing
up your package database.

> but there is no reason TL can't play nicely by putting install-info in
> a "private" bin directory, say "tl-bin", for use by TL scripts.   This
> could also be useful for TL-supplied utilities (unzip, tar, sed, awk,
> perl, gs, ruby, lua, etc.) on systems that don't commonly have them

That's an interesting idea.  On the other hand, it means that if I
install TeXLive on a Windows system, I have perl and gs installed, but
can't use them; if I need them for other reasons, I have to install them
a second time.

Regards, Frank

-- 
Dr. Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)