[OS X TeX] LaTeX Updater i-Package updated

[Alain Schremmer]

George Gratzer wrote:

> Dear Josep Maria,
>
> This really frightens me. What about helping us Unix idiots?
>
> What am I to do? Could somebody give us instructions?
>
> Do I uninstall and then install. Just install and it will overwrite?
>
> GG
>
> On May 1, 2006, at 10:22 AM, Josep M. Font wrote:
>
>> El 01/05/2006, a les 16:11, Martin Stokhof va escriure:
>>
>>> isn't the point of putting a newer, but experimental (so perhaps not 
>>> completely reliable and/or compatible) version in texmf.local this 
>>> that TeX will use whatever is in texmf.local first (actually after 
>>> whatever you have put in ~/Library/texmf, but forget about that), so 
>>> you will actually be running the new version, while the older 
>>> version is maintained in texmf (but not used)? That way if something 
>>> turns out to be wrong with the new version you can gracefully 
>>> degrade to the old version, simply by removing whatever is in 
>>> texmf.local.
>>
>>
>> Oh, yes, of course. And this is indeed an important and useful 
>> feature of Gerben's setup... but how many of its "normal" users do 
>> know this ? That's why I didn't suggest to change this behaviour, I 
>> just suggested to explain it better... What seems to me that should 
>> be avoided is that one i-package appears to be a "subset" of another 
>> one (as a LaTeX installation is a "subset" of a TeX installation), 
>> while in the inner workings it is slightly more complicated. If a 
>> user sees "LaTeX updater", she should understand clearly what it will 
>> do... And when updating the TeX installation a reminder of first 
>> uninstalling the LaTeX updater should also appear. Insiders are of 
>> course aware that any additions they have made to texmf.local will 
>> remain, but what about non-insiders ?
>
Now /this/ idiot—of the plain garden variety—IS truly afraid: I am still 
running 1.43 on 10.3.9 and I know that the days thereof are counted. 
True, last time I upgraded, when I went from Jaguar to Panther, all went 
well and I am certainly using only the plainest of plain installations. 
Out of the box so to speak. But what I fear is that, this time, the 
contents of the box are going to be a lot more than I can handle to 
write a plain math textbook and will force me to think and choose and I 
hate both :-) .

Regards
--schremmer


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