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

[Zdenek Wagner]

2010/7/22 Norbert Preining <preining at logic.at>:
> Phil, .... please ...
>
> On Do, 22 Jul 2010, Philip Taylor (Webmaster, Ret'd) wrote:
>> a first-time user of TeX Live to also familiarise himself
>
> Are you saying that a "first time user" changes class files and put
> them into TEXMFHOME????? Are you joking or is that serious?
>
The first time user IMHO makes use of what is available in his distro.
If he or she needs something nonstandard that cannot be installed by
standard menas, the probably puts it to the current directory and it
will work. If such a user starts building a flat file collection
without understanding the internals, it will sooner or later result in
a garbage, his or her distro will cease to work and nobody will be
able to help, the only remedy would be to erase everything and start
the whole installation from scratch. As I understand Norbert's
reasoning, his advices should prevent such a bad situation from the
very beginning. He tries to educate users not to create unmanagable
garbage.

> The OP asked about a changed .cls file ...
>
> I somehow feel like this thread is loosing more and more the contact
> to reality.
>
> At least *I* was using LaTeX for a long long time until I had the need
> to change a .cls file, or creating my own sty files outside the
> current project ...
>
> Well, maybe I am so stupid and retarded and others are doing that right
> after the
>        \documentclass{article}\begin{document}Hello World\end{document}
> If this is the case, please simply feel pity for such a retarded one,
> and sorry for disturbing the great minds.
>
> Best wishes
>
> Norbert
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Norbert Preining            preining@{jaist.ac.jp, logic.at, debian.org}
> JAIST, Japan                                 TeX Live & Debian Developer
> DSA: 0x09C5B094   fp: 14DF 2E6C 0307 BE6D AD76  A9C0 D2BF 4AA3 09C5 B094
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
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>



-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz