[OS X TeX] once more: owners, groups and privilegues of texmf.local

[Gerben Wierda]

On 21 Jan 2006, at 21:23, Friedrich Vosberg wrote:

> Morning.
>
> I want to install fonts for all TeX users of my system (MacOS X  
> 10.4.4 gwTeX by i-Installer). Therefore I want to install the font  
> files into /usr/local/teTeX/shared/texmf.local/...
>
> But this directory and all subdirectories have the folllowing  
> owner, groups and privilegues
>
>     drwxr-xr-x root wheel

Hmm, a current install takes the ownership of /usr/local/teTeX and  
copies that to all directories below. On my system, they are owned by  
root:admin.

> so I can't install there the directories and files as needed for  
> the installation of the fonts (Luxi Mono, Bera).
>
> Now I consider to change the group of texmf.local and its  
> subdirectories to admin.

That would not help because the directories are not group-writable.

> Are there serious reasons to refrain from doing this? And if so,  
> how can I install the files for *all* users only *once*? Would it  
> be a good idea to create my texmf directory in /Users/Shared/ 
> texmf/... and link to this directory by aliases in each ~/Library?

No, this would not be a good plan, either.

> What would you suggest?

You can set the ownership of teTeX in the configure phase of the TeX  
i-Package. If you own it yourself, you can write and everybody can  
still read. I think that would be the simplest way.

On the command line you can do this as well. If your uid is 'fred',  
you can say

	sudo chown -R fred /usr/local/teTeX

(or sudo chown -R fred /usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.local)

If you do that, you only have to remember that if you use the command  
line configuration scripts (like fmtutil) you need to use the -sys  
variants *without* sudo. The TeX i-Package wil on (re)configuring  
keep your ownership (which it takes from /usr/local/teTeX, see below).

G

PS. Here is how the TeX i-Package does it (in Perl)

     if ($dorepairownership) {
         print "### ${PROGNAME}: Your configuration may have created  
a mixed-ownership of files. Fixing...\n";
         my (undef,undef,undef,undef,$uid,$gid,undef) = stat( $ 
{II2INSTALLDIR});
         my $uname = getpwuid( $uid);
         my $group = getgrgid( $gid);
         print "### ${PROGNAME}: Repairing ownership of TeX  
installation in ${II2INSTALLDIR} to $uname:$group. Please wait...\n";
         ipkgsystem( "/usr/sbin/chown -R \"${uname}:${group}\" $ 
{II2INSTALLDIR}") == 0
             or die "### ${PROGNAME}: failed to run chown. Bailing  
out...\n";;
     }

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