[OS X TeX] TLU broke my symlink

[Herbert Schulz]

On Jun 6, 2010, at 4:20 PM, Justin C. Walker wrote:

> 
> On Jun 6, 2010, at 14:07 , Herbert Schulz wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On Jun 6, 2010, at 3:50 PM, Justin C. Walker wrote:
>> 
>>> Actually, I don't know what happened.  I'm just hoping to get attention :-}
>>> 
>>> I am using TL-2010 (on Mac OS X, 10.5.8), and update periodically.  Until today, I was using TLU 0.86.
>>> 
>>> Prior to the broken symlink, I had updated on 6/2.  Each time I update, I run a few typesets to make sure I haven't hosed things completely, and so far, no problems.
>>> 
>>> On Friday, I noticed BibDesk's preview was complaining.  Further checking revealed this:
>>> 
>>> <justin at zippo:SageDays22> ls -l /usr/texbin
>>> lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  63 Jun  5 17:31 /usr/texbin -> ../Library/TeX/Distributions/.DefaultTeX/Contents/Programs/i386
>>> 
>>> as expected, but
>>> 
>>> <justin at zippo:SageDays22> ls -l /usr/texbin/
>>> lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  admin  34 Mar  8  2008 /usr/texbin/ -> ../../../../../../../opt/local/bin
>>> 
>>> was somewhat of a surprise (not to mention totally wrong).  Has anyone seen this?  I don't make a habit of messing with symlinks in the system's backyard, so this wasn't something I did deliberately.
>>> 
>>> I fixed the problem by recreating the 'texbin' link.
>>> 
>>> Hoping for clarity, and thanks, in advance...
>>> 
>>> Justin
>> 
>> Howdy,
>> 
>> This sounds more as though you tickled something in the TeX Distribution System Preference Pane. That assignment sounds like it's pointing to something (possibly a TeX Distribution?) in MacPorts. Did you install a MacPorts distribution?
> 
> I have MacPorts installed, but "/opt" is not in any PATH that I know of, and I haven't installed anything via MacPorts in a while.  I also had not been messing with the Pref pane (until after the fact, while I was trying to reconstruct things).
> 
> Justin
> 

Howdy,

Although this shouldn't have anything to do with what you are seeing. You say you are using TL-2010. That is still in pretest so you are using the MacTeX(TeX Live)-2010 pretest or did you install TL directly from the repository? If the latter the database used by the TeX Distribution Preference Pane wasn't updated.

The path in that bad symlink (7 levels of ..) is very strange. Also, the date of that bad link is really strange too! Could you have a symlink 7 levels above root level that somehow got copied to /usr/texbin? Stranger and stranger!

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest dot com)