[texworks] Biber

[Adam R. Maxwell]

On October 20, 2020 at 11:31 AM, Joseph Wright <joseph.wright at morningstar2.co.uk> wrote:


On 20/10/2020 19:25, Joseph Wright wrote:

On 20/10/2020 18:49, Adam R. Maxwell wrote:
If my response to Paulo is still correct, I think this is a bug in
TeXWorks. It needs to set up a correct PATH variable for child
processes that it launches, if they in turn can execute child
processes (although there are significant security implications for
this). GUI applications on Mac OS X do not inherit environment
variables from shell config files: the developer needs to provide an
interface to set the environment appropriate (including the PATH);
TextMate is a good example of how to do this. Alternately, maybe
Joseph could wrap biber in a shell script that sets up a good
environment.


For the TeXworks list: Dick Koch (TeXShop developer) gave some info on
how it works in TeXShop. Rather than try the above, he has a couple of
dedicated entries in the GUI: one for the TeX binaries, one for
GhostScript. That's slightly different to how TeXworks operates, of course.


Seems I will have to go with the Terminal-lauch idea or (more likely)
just run Biber at the Terminal when I need it.


Joseph

Ah, sorry, re-reading I guess Adam was suggesting more or less what
TeXShop does, just expressed slightly differently. For reference,
TextMate has a small dialogue that covers a few variables (see attached).




Yeah, it just lets you specify arbitrary variables; I was thinking of your prior
message about trying to frob environment variables, and this is how you
could set that up in a GUI. It's not user-friendly, though, especially for
choosing paths.


For TeX Live Utility, I just allow choosing a single path to "TeX programs"  in
the GUI (set to /Library/TeX/texbin by default, so it Just Works for MacTeX).
I construct a full path to tlmgr as needed at runtime, and also add the
user-specified value to PATH so that when I execute tlmgr it can find
updmap/kpsewhich/etc. Sadly, you may need to sanitize the environment
or prepend to PATH (not great for security) if you do anything complex, as
clever users have broken things so I get tlmgr from TeX Live and a kpsewhich
from homebrew or MacPorts. That's super fun to debug via email.


regards,
Adam



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