[OS X TeX] TeXLive issue

[Maarten Sneep]

On May 9, 2007, at 23:08, Bruno Voisin wrote:

> Le 9 mai 07 à 22:00, Alan Litchfield a écrit :
>
>> I installed, and I assumed from Herb's question what he meant,  
>> from the command line with ./install-tl.sh. Means I need to  
>> manually update the path in TeXShop and $PATH because the install  
>> directory changes with every new release.
>>
>> This is the way normally do it since I use a number of different  
>> platforms (MacOS X, Linux, FreeBSD, Windows,...), so the only  
>> variation to the pattern is Windows.
>
> I do not think installing using MacTeX would break cross-platform  
> compatibility: AFAIK MacTeX installs a complete standard TeX Live  
> 2007, only adding bits to it to make it more Mac-like.

The main difference between MacTeX and a straight TeXLive is the  
location of the HOMETEXMF tree. On all things unix, this is (by  
default) ~/texmf, while the default with MacTeX is ~/Library/texmf.  
This was donedeliberately, to make TeX more mac-like, and for forward  
compatibility with existing gwTeX installs. Depending on how home  
directories are shared between computers, this may or may not be  
annoying. Be aware though that changing the MacTeX default will  
invalidate all results users will find on advise where to install  
packages.

> By this I mean you've got a fairly standard TeX Live installed  
> inside /usr/local/texlive/2007/, and an empty skeletal directory / 
> usr/local/texlive/texmf-local for you to put local system-wide  
> additions. The only bit that is probably non-standard is texmf.cnf,  
> which may differ from that in standard TeX Live.

It is standard afaik, with the exception noted above.

Maarten


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