[OS X TeX] Installing unstable packages

[Alan Munn]

On Feb 17, 2011, at 1:00 PM, Alan Munn wrote:

> 
> On Feb 17, 2011, at 11:38 AM, Theo Moore wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>> 
>> I'd like to install the pgfplots unstable package
>> (http://pgfplots.sourceforge.net/). I already have the latest stable
>> version of pgfplots installed, but I need a feature from the unstable
>> version. I have a couple of questions:
>> 
>> [1] Is there a (painless) way to install both and use one or the other
>> when the situation demands? I have lots of documents that use
>> pgfplots, so it wouldn't be nice if installing the newer, unstable
>> version somehow begins producing errors in the older documents.
> 
> Define painless. :-)
> 
> I don't think there's a really simple way to have two identically named packages selectively available. For small packages that involve a single .sty file, for example, the simplest solution is therefore to rename the unstable version and install it in your local texmf folder.  However, for a complex package like pgfplots, this isn't really very practical, since it has lots of sub-parts.
> 
> So an alternative is to create a duplicate of your ~/Library/texmf folder, give it another name, (e.g. texmf-unstable) and install the development version of pgfplots there.  Then when you want to use the development version of the package, you need to change the value of the environment variable TEXMFHOME:
> 
> (The reason to copy your existing ~/Library/texmf is that you want all your existing local packages to be available when you are using the development packages too.)
> 
> bash syntax:
> 
> export TEXMFHOME= ~/Library/texmf-unstable
> 
> tcsh syntax:
> 
> setenv TEXMFHOME ~/texmf-testing
> 

This line is should be:

 setenv TEXMFHOME ~/texmf-unstable

(The name is arbitrary; I just changed my mind on which one to use when I was writing the message.)

Alan