[OS X TeX] TeX Live 2005 Release Candidate, Intel binaries

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 24 août 05 à 11:06, Gerben Wierda a écrit :

> On Aug 24, 2005, at 10:12, Bruno Voisin wrote:
>
>> Le 24 août 05 à 01:21, Gerben Wierda a écrit :
>>
>>> - If you want to install on an Apple Intel Developer System,  
>>> please update i-Installer first to 2.70 (also universal, and I  
>>> have seen some potential problems with running the ppc version on  
>>> an Intel system). Also available from the *EXPERIMENTAL* i-Directory
>>
>> Are you sure it's there? When looking at the i-Package in the  
>> *EXPERIMENTAL* i-Directory, all I get is version 2.69.0 from 22  
>> October 2004.
>
> OOPS. Sorry. Corrected. Must have been the time of day (01:21 in  
> the morning, I should get some sleep at night. Given the fact that  
> I can only do serious work at night it is a miracle that there are  
> not more goof ups)

Installed both updates (i-Installer and TeX). Both working OK: I  
reinstalled XeTeX afterwards, and compiled a XeLaTeX document with no  
problem.

Regarding the dialogs during the install:

- After selecting All at the beginning of the process (so that both  
PPC and i686 binaries are installed), you get a warning telling  
either some foundation elements are missing, or non-functioning  
binaries will be installed. That might confuse a casual user,  
thinking he/she's done something wrong (but a casual user is not  
supposed to use Expert mode and select TL2005, anyway).

- Also at the selection stage, regarding the programs you have 3  
checkboxes:

     TeXLive Programs 2005 i686
     TeXLive Programs 2005 powerpc
     TeXLive 2005 Programs powerpc+i686 extras

At first, I thought that the 3rd item was the concatenation of the  
first 2 put together (all the more so since the end of "extras" was  
outside the dialog "text area" and was cut out, leaving only "ext"  
visible). I found the name of the corresponding files easier to  
understand (telling the first two are binaries, and the third  
libraries):

     tl2005-bin-i686
     tl2005-bin-powerpc
     tl2005-lib-universal

A nice thing would be that when the user positions the pointer on an  
item, the corresponding explanation from the Subprocess Output window  
appears in one of these yellow framed boxes (I don't remember the  
proper computer jargon for these boxes):

### tex.selector: Set "tl2005-bin-i686" description: "This set  
contains the programs taken from TeXLive 2005. These are the  
essential binaries you need to run TeX on your system."
### tex.selector: Set "tl2005-bin-powerpc" description: "This set  
contains the programs taken from TeXLive 2005. These are the  
essential binaries you need to run TeX on your system."
### tex.selector: Set "tl2005-lib-universal" description: "This set  
contains extras taken from TeXLive 2005, namely the lib and include  
directories. You only need this if you want to compile programs  
against TeX-provided libraries."

Maybe that's already the case, I didn't think about trying at the  
time. By the way, in the first 2 descriptions, it might be clearer to  
replace "on your system" by something like "on an Intel-based Mac"  
and "on a PowerPC-based Mac", respectively.

Bruno--------------------- Info ---------------------
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