[OS X TeX] Finally we are grown up

[Joachim Kock]

Hello all,

I second everybody in their praise of Gerben's work on tex in OSX, and in
the regret that he will not pursue it.  On the other hand I second Claus in
his calm-down message, and his confidence that the full TeXLive from TUG
will turn out to be a good successor to gwtex -- thanks also to many
finetunings by Gerben that have found their way into TeXLive!  I hope there
will soon be an easy-to-use MacTeX with TeXLive -- keep up your excellent
work, Dick!

However, the 250-lines easy-instructions posted by an enthusiastic Claus
Gerhardt make me think that perhaps the general pessimism is justified :-(

I would not recommend anybody to follow his instructions, and I hardly 
find it 'grown up' to use Apple scripts to access the file system or do 
'type a letter and delete it again' to test whether you have sufficient 
writing privileges!

Teenagers are always the ones who feel most grown up :-)

In fact I think it is a very bad idea to use Apple scripts to build up and
execute shell scripts -- in particular scripts that run as administrator
and use rm -fR -- Applescript and shell scripts have very different quoting
rules, and there is a certain risk that an unexpected space or special
character in a file name will lead to unexpected results.  (This is a
general warning -- in the case at hand the path names are probably under
control, and possibly Claus has thought out all possible scenaria...)

In any case, the apple script wrapping is just a completely unnecessary
layer of complication and mystification.

Just my two cents.

Cheers,
Joachim.

PS: Don't hurry -- it is likely that better instructions will appear over
the next weeks, and Gerben hasn't even stopped his support yet!


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