[tex-live] textlive seems to ignore top of home tree

[hometreetexlive.9.virgilinux at dfgh.net]

--- On Fri, 7/16/10, Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard - mpg at elzevir.fr <+hometreetexlive+virgilinux+8ddc2d745d.mpg#elzevir.fr at spamgourmet.com> wrote:

> From: Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard - mpg at elzevir.fr <+hometreetexlive+virgilinux+8ddc2d745d.mpg#elzevir.fr at spamgourmet.com>
> Subject: Re: [tex-live] textlive seems to ignore top of home tree (hometreetexlive: message 1 of 9)
> To: hometreetexlive.9.virgilinux at dfgh.net
> Cc: tex-live at tug.org
> Date: Friday, July 16, 2010, 5:08 PM
> Le 16/07/2010 14:56, hometreetexlive.9.virgilinux at dfgh.net
> a écrit :
> > I never encountered information explicitly stating
> this fact, and in fact
> > naively imagined that by placing a package at the
> "top" of the home tree (as
> > opposed to a subdirectory within  $HOME\texmf\),
> texlive would find it more
> > easily.
> > 
> It is one of the most common mistakes when putting files in
> TEXMFHOME, so it
> certainly should be better documented. Where did you look
> for documentation?
> Where would you expect to find this information?

Hi, Manuel:
Thanks for your prompt reply. 
Among other sources, I looked at:
http://people.debian.org/%7Epreining/TeX/TeX-on-Debian/ch2.html
http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=privinst
as well as the recent discussion here:
http://www.tug.org/pipermail/tex-live/2010-May/thread.html#25729

For example, the first reference states:
"TEXMFHOME: Default location: $HOME/texmf/
Contains user-specific static input files, e.g. new LaTeX packages.
:::::::::::::
If you want to add files, you should usually use TEXMFLOCAL or TEXMFHOME, depending on whether you are the system administrator or a user." 

The placement of LaTeX classes in TEXMFHOME/tex/ when mentioned it is done in a way that sounds like a recommendation, and not a hard requirement. 

> > The above behaviour seems reproducible 100% of the
> time.  Is it intended  (a
> > "feature"), or  a "bug", or the result of a
> non-standard configuration of our
> > system?
> > 
> It is a perfectly standard and intended feature.
> 
> > How/where can one adjust texmf.cnf or whichever
> appropriate to make texlive
> > consider the top of the tree so that either
> > $HOME\texmf\mypackage.cls 
> > or $HOME\texmf\tex\mypackage.cls 
> > is found?
> > 
> Why to you want to do so? I recommend you keep the standard
> layout (see tds.pdf
> (which you can locate easily by typing "texdoc tds" in a
> shell)) unless you have
> a strong reason to deviate from it.

The belief that if the system cannot find something that is in the "top" (root) directory, it would have even more difficulties to find it in a subdirectory -- wrong in this case -- it is somewhat intuitive,  especially for a not so experienced user. 

And if one only has a few items in TEXMFHOME (presumably the most common case) a subdirectory structure would seem unnecessary.  

So, if the administrator can easily reconfigure our texlive system so that it finds both  TEXMFHOME/mypackage.cls and TEXMFHOME/tex/mypackage.cls this could save some users (and possibly help-desk personnel) valuable time  ("latex cannot find my class not matter what I do").

Best,

Virgil