[tex-live] Full installation on Unix: two minor nits

Nelson H. F. Beebe beebe at math.utah.edu
Tue Aug 26 02:16:52 CEST 2008


On Friday, I fetched the TeX Live install-tl-unx.tar.gz distribution,
unpacked it, and successfully installed it with all binaries, into a
directory shared by all of our systems.

There were a couple of minor nits in the installation, however.

(1) I specified an alternate installation tree of

	/usr/local/share/texlive/2008/

The installer then reported

	<1> TEXDIR:       /usr/local/share/texlive/2008
	    support tree: /usr/local/share/texlive/2008/texmf

	<2> TEXMFLOCAL:     /usr/local/share/texlive/texmf-local
	<3> TEXMFSYSVAR:    /usr/local/share/texlive/2008/texmf-var
	<4> TEXMFSYSCONFIG: /usr/local/share/texlive/2008/texmf-config

	<5> TEXMFHOME:      ~/texmf

Notice that item <2> lies outside the specified tree, which, I think,
should NOT happen.  The entire installation should always go UNDER the
user-specified root.  I overrode item <2> to set it to

	/usr/local/share/texlive/2008/texmf-local

(2) The installer later asked

	Other actions:
	 <R> return to main menu
	 <Q> quit

I typed

	R

to which it responded

	Unknown command: R

However, it did return me to the main menu.  Further experimentation
showed that it was expecting "r", not "R", despite the prompts.

This is certainly confusing.  Also, I think a <RETurn> should be
enough to get back to the main menu (perhaps that is how my "R"
followed by a return key was interpreted).

I successfully typeset and displayed (with xdvi) some simple plain
TeX, LaTeX 2.09, and LaTeX 2e test documents on each of several binary
architectures.

After the installation, I compared the sizes of the 2007 and 2008
trees:

	2007:	1.8GB	5215 directories	61522 files
	2008:	2.7GB	6195 directories	73785 files

Evidently, it has been a busy and productive year for the TeX Live
team.  Congratulations!

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- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: beebe at math.utah.edu  -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       beebe at acm.org  beebe at computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
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