[OS X TeX] Symlinks

Alan T Litchfield alan at alphabyte.co.nz
Sat Jan 16 00:22:52 EST 2010


Hi,

Is there any reason why you can't put the .sty file into .../texmf- 
local/ on each of the machines?

Cheers
Alan

On 16/01/2010, at 4:38 PM, Alain Schremmer wrote:

>
> On Jan 6, 2010, at 3:08 PM, Simon Spiegel wrote Re: [OS X TeX]  
> Keeping TeX installations synchronized between machines
>
>> A symlink is something like an alias, but not quite the same. It  
>> also refers to a location on your hard drive, but comes from the  
>> Unix side. Symlinks are created in the shell, aliases in the  
>> Finder. The main difference between symlinks and aliases is that a  
>> symlink is completely transparent, meaning that the file system  
>> handles the symlink exactly like the place it refers to which is  
>> not the case with aliases.
>>
>> To create an alias you have to go the Terminal and enter something  
>> like:
>>
>> ln -s target link_name
>>
>> So let's say you put your personal texmf tree on your iDisk, you  
>> had to do something like this:
>>
>> Open the terminal
>> Go to ~/Library with 'cd ~/Library'
>> then create a symlink in ~/Library which refers to the texmf folder  
>> on your iDisk 'ln -s /Volumes/nameofyouriDisk/texmf'
>>
>> After this, LaTeX will automatically use the texmf directory on  
>> your iDisk.
>
>
> In order to keep my preambles, etc as short as possible, I use .sty  
> files. Since I don't know what I am doing, I proceed by trials and  
> error which works but at the cost of many different versions.
>
> Not only to synchronize between machines, but in general to keep  
> everything that belongs to a given version together, I wanted to  
> keep the sty files together with the project files and I used  
> symlinks to these sty files in texmf > tex > Latex.
>
> With a little bit of trial and error, I managed to do that and it  
> worked for one tome but not for the other. So, I remembered having  
> downloaded SymbolicLinker which Vosberg had mentioned on On Apr 6,  
> 2009, at 6:19 AM, RA.
>
> And that worked exactly as advertised.
>
> What I will also do is to make a copy of each tome on my laptop and  
> create symlinks there too. Then, what I hope will work is that the  
> symlinks will not notice when I change a file to a new version--with  
> the same name of course.
>
> Grateful regards to both Spiegel and Vosberg
> --schremmer




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