[OS X TeX] OSX-ifying TeX even more

[Christian Heine]

Hi all,
> >>> Pro and con anyone?
> >>
> >> Apple developed some recommendations how to handle and where to
> >> place different kinds of "bundles." UNIX has a longer history.
> >>
> >> To sing it with Marx: I'm against it!
> >
> > Yes, but the internal structure of these directories would be
> > identical, and there would be hard or soft links to the directories
> > in the bundle - both worlds would then be respected.  The unix
> > tools would _see_ no difference at all,
> > and the data would be stored in a way that survives complex
> > transitions.
>
> Count me among the opposants as well. OS X brings valuable
> clarification and organization to the Unix pieces it is based upon,
> and by breaking that organization you would lose a lot.
>
> On OS X, applications should go inside /Applications, libraries, back-
> ends and so forth inside /Library, and for those parts that come
> unchanged from the Unix world inside the invisible directories /bin, /
> usr/bin and so forth, defined partly by guidelines dating back to the
> origins of Unix and partly by usage. And don't forget that numerous
> Unix applications use hard-coded paths, based on these guidelines and
> usage.

What about the concept of using /Library/Frameworks/*.framework instead as
place? It is clearly not the Unix way but has been adopted by a few
utilities/apps, namely R (R.framework), QGIS (using GDAL.framework and
other GIS libraries/utils) and Python (see similar, old discussion on
pythonmac list [1]) which all run happily on OS X and the command line.
Personally, I find this system quite useful and more transparent (more
Mac-like, if you want) than the old /usr/local/ and the like. Not knowing
the intricacies of TeX enough and not being a programmer, I don't know if
it would make sense to have a TeX.framework. May be someone with OS X
programming experience can shed some light on this.

Cheers,
Christian

[1] http://mail.python.org/pipermail/pythonmac-sig/2001-July/003846.html




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