[tex-live] texmflocal

[Zdenek Wagner]

2012/7/30 Mojca Miklavec <mojca.miklavec.lists at gmail.com>:
> On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 11:05 AM, Vladimir Lomov wrote:
>> Hello,
>> ** Norbert Preining [2012-07-30 16:22:15 +0900]:
>>
>>> Hi
>>
>>>> Create file `texmf.cnf' and write to it
>>>> TEXMFHOME=$HOME/texmf;$HOME/texmf-projects/STUFF
>>
>>> NOOOOOO
>>
>>> That is even MUCH MUCH less supported any will create much more trouble. PLEASE don't do that!!!
>>
>> Then you may be know how to an ordinal user (i.e. not admin) can use
>> several TDS trees in scheme that I described (separate TDS trees that
>> can be switched on or off without messing TEXMFHOME)?
>
> In principle one can add more trees to TEXMF variable. But I don't
> know yet why multiple trees in TEXMFLOCAL or TEXMFHOME are not
> desired, so maybe changing TEXMF is even worse.
>
I have several trees in TEXMF, these are my development trees for my
own packages. The difference is that TL never writes to $TEXMF but if
you have several directories in TEXMFLOCAL and you wish to create a
new subdirectory in it and put files there, you will not get a unique
path. I have several directories defined in my
/usr/loca/texlive/YYYY/texmf.cnf such as:
TEXMFDEVEL = $SELFAUTOPARENT/../texmf-devel

TEXMF then contains TEXMFDEVEL (and other directories). I a script I
can obtain the path by:
kpsewhich -var-value TEXMFDEVEL

And I make use of another feature. I have a generic package A being
developed in subversion. I have a project P beain developed in
subversion but separately. This project needs package A for printing
and any revision of P must be printable any time in the future exactly
in the same form. In order to achieve it, project P refers to package
A as an external reference and exact revision of A is used. When
running TeX, TEXINPUT is defined to prepend the directories from that
external reference to the search path. Thus if I return to an old
revision of P, package A will also be downgraded to the proper
historical version.

Look what nice features are available without messing with several
TEXMFLOCAL trees!

> MikTeX has a nice GUI to add and remove additional trees.
>
> I believe that gnuplot concatenates TEXMFLOCAL with
> "tex/latex/gnuplot" for example, so in case that one has multiple
> trees, gnuplot would have problems installing files there, but I
> consider that being gnuplot's fault.
>
> Mojca



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