[tex-live] Missing "ppc" symbolic link in .FactoryDefaults/gwTeX-2003-2005 ?

[jfbu]

Hi everybody,

I made recently an installation of TeXLive 2010 via MacTeX,
on a Mac OS X 10.3.9

I previously had a teTeX based installation dating back to 2005,
via Gerben Wierda's i-installer

the MacTeX installer detected correctly the previous installation

For testing purposes, i wanted to try out switching back to the old
tree. Something did not work and I identified the cause of the problem
to be the following:

in /Library/TeX/Distributions/.FactoryDefaults:

drwxrwxr-x  3 root  admin  102  2 Dec 19:47 Fink-teTeX
   drwxrwxr-x  3 root  admin  102  2 Dec 19:47 MacPorts-teTeX
   drwxrwxr-x  3 root  admin  102  2 Dec 19:47 TeXLive-2010
   drwxrwxr-x  3 root  admin  102  2 Dec 19:47 gwTeX-2003-2005

all 4 directories have a Contents/Program/  sub-directory with each 3  
symbolic links
i386, powerpc and ppc.

Actually not gwTeX-2003-2005 which only has "i386" and "powerpc" links

however my usr/texbin symbolic link is

texbin -> ../Library/TeX/Distributions/.DefaultTeX/Contents/Programs/ppc

which in the ends corresponds to the "ppc" link in the directories  
Contents/Program of
each texdist tree. As the "ppc" was missing from gwTeX-2003-2005 it did  
not work

I don't remember removing by myself such a link! so I assume it was not  
created by
the installation script in the first place

An oddity: the control panel "TeX Distribution" installed by MacTeX did  
give me two
choices but on selecting gwTeX-2003-2005 and even after having typed-in  
my password
to validate administrator rights, it did not seem to do anything and it  
seems it first
did something after I had done sudo chmod g+w on the whole /Library/TeX  
  tree.

Further oddity: then appeared a "/usr/powerpctexbin" symbolic link
lrwxr-xr-x    1 root  wheel     66 17 Dec 23:24 powerpctexbin ->  
../Library/TeX/Distributions/.DefaultTeX/Contents/Programs/powerpc

which would have made the set-up functional, except for the fact that  
nothing
was changed to /etc/csh.login and /etc/profile, so the path to the  
binaries was
still /usr/texbin and not /usr/powerpctexbin

(and pointed to nothing because of the missing "ppc" link)

The cure to all this was simply for me to manually create the "ppc" link

   
/Library/TeX/Distributions/.FactoryDefaults/gwTeX-2003-2005/Contents/ 
Programs:
   total used in directory 24 available 14099312
   drwxrwxr-x   5 root  admin  170 18 Dec 00:30 .
   drwxrwxr-x  12 root  admin  408  2 Dec 19:47 ..
   lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  admin   66  2 Dec 19:47 i386 ->  
../../../../../../../usr/local/teTeX/bin/i386-apple-darwin-current
   lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  admin   69  2 Dec 19:47 powerpc ->  
../../../../../../../usr/local/teTeX/bin/powerpc-apple-darwin-current
   lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  admin   69 18 Dec 00:30 ppc ->  
../../../../../../../usr/local/teTeX/bin/powerpc-apple-darwin-current

I am rather impressed that everything works so nicely. In particular it  
is very clever how one does
not need to change anything to the /usr/texbin symbolic link, so that  
there is no need to ever
fiddle with $PATH once it has been set-up to contain "/usr/texbin"

and switching from one distribution to the other is as simple as  
modifying the sole link in
  /Library/TeX/Distributions/.DefaultTeX
very nice

Regards,

Jean-Francois