[tex-live] sagetex.sty

[George N. White III]

On Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 8:26 PM, Pavel Striz <striz at fame.utb.cz> wrote:
> Good afternoon,
>
> I was experimenting with Sage and SageTeX (Ubuntu, texlive-full).  The thing
> I have discovered which would be nice to have to save some time is the
> latest version of the sagetex.sty file in the TeX Live distribution.  All
> the other approaches recommended in the SageTeX documentation and in the
> Internet forums would become just unneccesary workarounds.

<http://www.sagemath.org/doc/installation/sagetex.html> explains (near the
bottom of the page) exactly why TL should not provide sagemath.sty, and
points out that if your version of TL includes sagemath.sty then you should
replace TL's sagemath.sty it with the version from Sage.

TL can't possibly track Sage because many users have quite old TL installed
via distro packages.  Whoever is responsible for SageTeX must certainly make
sure SageTeX works with current TL as well as older TL versions, so the
problem boils down to finding an easier way for end users to make Sage's
sagetex.sty available to whatever TL is in use.

There are similar problems for ConTeXt, which also changes too often to
fit with the TL release schedule and for non-free fonts such as MathTime
and Lucida.

My approach to these issues is to put each add-on in a separate texmf
tree, but this does require a bit of work to ensure the appropriate variables
are updated in "$(kpsewhich texmf.cnf)".   Perhaps some thought should
be given to an 'add-site-texmfs' tool that would take a (list of?) top-level
texmf tree(s) and make the required adjustments, as in:

$ tlmgr  conf texmf TEXMFSAGE \
 /Applications/Sage/app/Contents/Resources/sage/local/share/texmf

which presently just ads a line to "$(kpsewhich texmf.cnf)" without the
extra steps needed to ensure that the new tree gets added to the TEXMF
list.

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia