Suggestion to support TeXDist symlink creation on Macs out-of-the-box

[Siep Kroonenberg]

On Sun, Mar 31, 2019 at 03:40:24PM -0600, Karl Berry wrote:
>     When I click "Specify directories", it says that the installer
>     cannot write to /usr/local/share/man, but that's just because that
>     folder doesn't exist. Shouldn't the installer attempt to create that
>     directory instead of saying that it's not able to write it?
> 
> I don't know if the GUI code is doing its own writable checks, but in
> the text installer, I can't reproduce this. I tried specifying putting
> symlinks in a test directory /opt/tl/local/bin (with o l), where neither
> that nor /opt/tl/local existed, and the installer dutifully created
> both directories. /opt/tl itself has to be writable.
> 
> In tlpkg/TLUtils.pm, function add_link_dir_dir, the second line calls
> mkdirhier on the destination. If that fails, it's supposed to write a
> warning (two lines down). If it succeeds, and -w still fails, that is
> odd. Maybe you could put in some debugging messages to see what's
> happening in your case ... -k

The GUI does its own checking in this case. The idea is to put
symlinks in directories where the system will look for them. To me
it makes no sense to create such directories if they are not already
there.

But after release we could think about how to accomodate the Mac way of
supporting multiple distributions, as a separate issue.

-- 
Siep Kroonenberg