[OS X TeX] Updating GW distribution

[Will Robertson]

On 29 Jun 2004, at 11:27 AM, David Oliver wrote:

> I've not updated my teTeX distribution via GW's installer (v.2 circa 
> 2002) in sometime and wish to do so now.

It's always nice to get up to date every once in a while...

> Would that it were possible to update packages and documentation that 
> have changed or been added rather than reinstalling the entire 
> multi-megabyte distribution. I suspect this is not possible and if 
> anyone wants to confirm this (or pleasantly surprise me otherwise) I'd 
> be grateful.

i-Installer is as clever as it can be: it will only *download* that 
which has changed (if you haven't updated in a while that still may 
well be significant). It would be a fairly impossible task, I believe, 
to incrementally upgrade the whole TeX tree. Besides, it makes no 
difference from your end, as we'll see...

> Can someone remind me of the special care one needs to take on a 
> re-install (actually, an update) as opposed to first install or point 
> me to an appropriate doc with this information? I could not find this 
> point discussed at http://www.rna.nl/tex.html. I mainly wonder whether 
> the directory structure will be automatically updated or an entire new 
> structure installed in addition in  ~/Library/

You might be thinking of the readme.howtexfindsfiles.txt, but apart 
from that I don't believe there is a document about this sort of thing. 
Relax and let i-Installer do the work for you...

If you've installed things as you should have, you need take no 
precautions.
i-Installer will overwrite everything in the texmf.tetex tree and the 
texmf.gwtex tree (both in the /usr/local/tetex/share/ directory), and 
leave intact everything inside the texmf.local tree as well as 
~/Library/texmf/. That's why the separate directories exist!

Best of luck!

W

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