[OS X TeX] MacTeX installation

[Richard Koch]

David,

On Jan 24, 2008, at 10:55 AM, David Airey wrote:

> I previously posted about linking up with BBEdit and found out that  
> maybe my TeX installation is not quite right. However, I have  
> checked my file locations against the page describing where  
> everything should have been put:
>
> http://www.tug.org/mactex/whatgetsinstalledwhere.html
>
> and it seems that everything is fine. Yet Maarten found this was not  
> the case. MacTeX installations says it does this after installing:
>
> "When the TeX Live install script finishes, it prints a message  
> suggesting that users modify their PATH variable appropriately.  
> MacTeX modifies both PATH and MAN entries automatically. This  
> modification is done using scripts from Gerben Wierda and is  
> consistent with his TeX distributions."
>
> Could this have gone wrong? How do I check that this was in fact  
> done correctly?
>
> The reason I ask is because some R scripts also told me I don't have  
> a working TeX installation or that my PATH is not set appropriately.  
> So I'm wondering if Gerben Wierda's scripts failed?
>
> I'm using Leopard 10.5.1.


You can easily test this. Open Terminal in /Applications/Utilities. Type

	echo $PATH

You will get a list of locations. If this list contains /usr/local/bin  
and /usr/texbin, then PATH is set appropriately.

Since making the latest MacTeX packages, I discovered that the process  
can indeed go wrong on Leopard. I'll fix the packages in the next few  
days. Here are details:

Gerben's scripts modify /etc/profile and /etc/csh.login to add the  
above locations to the PATH. But in Leopard a different mechanism is  
used to globally modify PATH. Namely, these scripts now call /usr/ 
libexec/path_helper, which adds paths listed in the file /etc/paths  
(this list contains /usr/local/bin) and then adds paths listed in  
files in the directory /etc/paths.d. So on Leopard we don't modify / 
etc/profile and /etc/csh.login; instead we add a file to /etc/paths.d  
listing /usr/texbin.

However, it turns out that Leopard doesn't install the new /etc/ 
profile if the old /etc/profile has been modified. So our postinstall  
script ought to call Gerben's scripts if /etc/profile is the old Tiger  
version.

Dick Koch
koch@,math.uoregon.edu