Call for testing: TeX Collection 2020

[Richard Koch]

Manfred,

I have completed testing the DVD on the Macintosh.This testing revealed two problems with the original MacTeX.iso, and a new version is ready for you to download and place on the DVD.

I installed on

	Catalina, macOS 10.15-5 Beta 1
	Mohave, macOS 10.14.6
	High Sierra, macOS 10.13.6
	Sierra, macOS 10.12.6

I'll explain the problems for everyone else. MacTeX supports the three latest versions of macOS, so in 2020 we support Catalina, Mohave, High Sierra. However Mojca Miklavec compiles legacy binaries for earlier Mac systems, and those binaries are also on the DVD. We use the Unix install script on the DVD, so we can support versions of macOS as old as 10.6.

After running the Unix install script, we ask users to install a very small TeXDist package which automatically sets up a symbolic link to the binaries. This package has to know about the two sets of binaries, pointing to one set on High Sierra and above, and the other set on Sierra and below. Sadly, the script doing this had a less than sign in a spot where it should have had a less than or equal sign, so the package failed on Sierra, but no other system. This is now fixed. Always test edge cases.

To do the Unix install, we ask users to copy four lines from a document and glue them into Terminal, which runs the commands in a shell. The first of these four commands is

	bash

because bash is the default shell on the Mac. We do this because some users may have switched to a different shell and the following commands might then fail.

But on Catalina, the default command is zsh, and when the user types "bash" the Mac responds with a notice that the default shell has changed and an explanation of how to reconfigure for the new shell.
Users should just ignore this, of course.

The Unix installer than starts Tk and Apple immediately displays another warning: ""DEPRECATION WARNING: The system version of Tk is deprecated and may be removed in a future release. Please do not rely on it. Set TK_SILENCE_DEPRECATION=1 to suppress this warning." Users should also ignore this, of course.

So we added a paragraph to the install instructions telling Catalina users that they will see these warnings and should just ignore them.

Thanks for putting up with us!

Richard Koch