[OS X TeX] Fwd: [MacTeX] TeXLive and MacTeX (documentation clarification)

[Maarten Sneep]

Karl Berry has kindly answered the questions from Rowland I had  
forwarded to him.

Begin forwarded message:

>>> TEXMFLOCAL
>>> This tree is where the TEX system (not as part of the initial
>>> installation, but rather as time goes by) puts non-version-specific
>
> I can understand Rowland's concern based on that statement, but that
> documentation is misleading now; I'll have to fix it.  By default, the
> mktex* scripts now do not put anything in TEXMFLOCAL (that was true in
> earlier versions of TL).
>
> This is because, as distributed, the varfonts feature is set in
> texmf/web2c/mktex.cnf and therefore the VARTEXFONTS tree is used,  
> which
> is set to $TEXMFVAR/fonts (= ~/.texlive2008/texmf-var/fonts) by  
> default.
> (In texmf.cnf.)
>
> (At least this is my belief; I can't explicitly test it out right now.
> I'm not sure which tree is used by default when the varfonts feature
> isn't enabled.)
>
>> The TeXLive documentation also calls it the 'Recommended location to
>> put any local packages or configuration settings',
>
> Right.
>
>> local additions are going to be mixed up with some sort of automated
>> system for adding and deleting files.]
>
> It was never such a general mechanism.  We're not talking package
> updates here.  The only files that were added were the tfm/pk/...  
> files
> created by mktextfm/mktexpk/mktex..., purely in response to the user
> running documents that needed them.  Nothing was ever deleted.
>
> Please feel free to forward this to Rowland and/or the user list.