packages in TeXShop (was: Re: [OS X TeX] question regarding spacing after a period)

[cfrees at imapmail.org]

On Fri 13th Mar, 2009 at 16:40, Axel E. Retif seems to have written:

> On  13 Mar, 2009, at 16:08, Peter Dyballa wrote:
>
>> Am 12.03.2009 um 11:13 schrieb Axel E. Retif:
>> 
>>> That is if his locate database is up to date, which means his machine has 
>>> to be turned on at about 3 o'clock every day.
>> 
>> Axel,
>> 
>> this is not true in Tiger and Leopard. I wanted to check it, so I waited 
>> until it was updated. Here is the previous state documented (then I let 
>> Fink compile qt4-x11):
>>
>> 	-r--r--r--   1 nobody  wheel  8244919 12 Mär 03:43 
>> /var/db/locate.database
>> 
>> Then I waited until today:
>>
>> 	-r--r--r--   1 nobody  wheel  8202863 13 Mär 16:29 
>> /var/db/locate.database
>> 
>> The reason is that the Launch Service has taken over a lot of UNIX system 
>> services. One of them is cron. And it's able to act like anacron.
>
> Huh? That would be great, but
>
> -rw-r--r--  1 nobody  wheel  9294590 Feb 14 18:05 /var/db/locate.database
>
> On my laptop, which I use more, permissions are like yours (-r--r--r--), but 
> updated last Saturday (Mar 7), as usual.

In theory, it isn't necessary to have the machine on in the wee hours
(or run anacron) in 10.4 and later but, at least in 10.4, you cannot
rely on the new method in practice unfortunately. So at least in 10.4,
anacron is still useful if you want to make sure the cron jobs are run
daily/weekly/monthly. My _impression_ is that if you aren't too
bothered about them being run quite so often, you may fairly safely
just leave the system to get on with it but I can't speak from
experience as I use anacron on my machine to make sure everything is
done:
-r--r--r--   1 nobody  wheel       29M Mar  7 01:54	/var/db/locate.database
-r--r--r--   1 nobody  wheel       10M Mar 13 01:13	/usr/local/var/locatedb
(Sadly GNU locate needs a different format for the database...)

- cfr