[OS X TeX] MacTeX-2008

[Richard Koch]

Folks,

On Sep 5, 2008, at 1:22 AM, Anthony Morton wrote, after quoting Bruno

>> Why does MacTeX do that? I plead guilty for this. Initially the  
>> Perl/Tk install package prepared by Dick Koch installed everything  
>> exactly as the standard installation procedure, namely scripts in / 
>> usr/bin. Dick's idea was precisely that people would get exactly  
>> the same as with the standard install, for compatibility purposes.  
>> I asked that /usr/local/bin was used instead,

> And you did the right thing.  No third-party installer should be  
> putting stuff in /usr/bin, ever.  The only things that belong in  
> there are components supplied by the OS vendor.  That's a long- 
> standing Unix-ish convention.

Bruno completely convinced me of this, and it didn't hurt that Karl  
Berry chimed in at his most insistent.

Let me add an important conjecture. I believe that these five binaries  
are irrelevant. To me they look like EXAMPLES. One, for example, uses  
Perl/Tk to implement a GUI editor with only a few lines of code. I  
think we could eliminate the binaries entirely without affecting the  
use of Perl/Tk for "tlmgr --gui", but I was afraid to try!

Dick