[tlu] PATH not propagated to *-sys scripts (Yosemite)

[Adam R. Maxwell]

On Jul 10, 2014, at 23:45 , Jeffrey Goldberg <jeffrey at goldmark.org> wrote:

> On Jul 10, 2014, at 4:14 PM, Adam R. Maxwell <amaxwell at mac.com> wrote:
>>> According to tlu logs, tlu is correctly picking up /usr/texbin in PATH.
>> 
>> It uses a fixed PATH based on the system config file /etc/paths and whatever you specify in TLU prefs. Your shell PATH is ignored completely.
> 
> Good to know.
> 
> I notice in the source that you do not look at files in /etc/paths.d/* but just look at /etc/paths and then hardcode /usr/texbin in addition to what you find there.

I don't hardcode anything, except base OS paths as a fallback in case the user has botched or removed /etc/paths (this has happened). The TeX path is still read from TLU preferences.

> 
>>> I also haven’t checked the tlu source to see if it is using the deprecated AuthorizationExecuteWithPrivileges approach or the 10.7 and greater XPC approach.
>> 
>> I use AEWP. XPC would be a tremendous effort for no gain, other than satisfying Apple's flavor-of-the-month approach to security and privileged tools.
> 
> I understand, but it is possible that the problem I’m running into is related to using a deprecated technique. With luck the problem is idiosyncratic to me. I haven’t seen this discussed elsewhere (though I haven’t check Apple Dev forums, which is where I really should.)

I'll also note that any security improvements would be meaningless, since the entire goal of TLU is to blindly run a huge mass of perl and shell tools as root. AEWP was designed to run an installer, and that's exactly what I'm doing. If Apple breaks it, I'll have to consider my options really carefully. Time to see if my access to 10.10 includes dev tools…sigh.

One thing you could also try is changing ownership of the /usr/local/texlive/2014 directory to the user running TLU, which should bypass the AEWP call if I remember aright.

Adam