[tex-live] Where is the root dir of my Tex Live installation

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2013-11-16 at 18:00:17 -0500, Scott Kostyshak wrote:

 > On Sat, Nov 16, 2013 at 2:24 AM, Lars Madsen <daleif at imf.au.dk> wrote:
 > > Sounds reasonable regarding the linking.
 > >
 > > The thing I'd like to see in TL is some script or what ever that
 > > will take care if the equivs stuff (or how ever you are doing
 > > that trick). There are many Ubuntu vanilla TL users, and most of
 > > them find the equivs stuff confusing (even though, the recipe on
 > > Tug.org is easy to follow)
 > 
 > Yes, install-tl-ubuntu uses equivs. But as you say, it is a "trick"
 > and it is not perfect so I don't think this trick belongs anywhere
 > in the official TeX Live installation tools.

No, it's not a trick.  It's a tool which tells the Debian/Ubuntu
package manager that a user prefers to maintain a particular package
himself even if other packages depend on it.

It's definitely a good thing.  On some other Linux systems I tried to
remove the Type 1 fonts provided by Ghostscript because I wanted to
maintain them myself.  Disk space was much more expensive these
days. Their package managers assumed that Ghostscript is nothing worth
without its fonts and thus removed Ghostscript too.  No problem so
far, I could maintain Ghostscript at /usr/local as well.  But the
package managers wiped out the whole /usr/share/doc tree because they
assumed that everything therein is worthless without Ghostcript.  What
a pain.

The equivs package avoids such problems.  It's not a dirty trick.

You said:

 > I don't think this trick belongs anywhere in the official TeX Live
 > installation tools.

Don't know what you mean with "official TeX Live installation tools".
The equivs package is part of the Debian/Ubuntu package management
system.  It can be mentioned in the TeX Live documentation but it
can't be shipped with TeX Live for several reasons.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha                                      Phone: +49-511-3373112
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