[OS X TeX] Re: Installing unstable packages

[Michael Sharpe]

On Feb 17, 2011, at 5:48 PM, Theo Moore wrote:

> Hi again all,
> 
> This was Michael's comment:
> 
>> Another possible option may be to leave your old pgfplots
>> where it is and make use of ~/Library/texlive/texmf-var
>> (I assume you're using MacTeX 2010) to install the unstable version
>> when you want to use that, then simple remove the folder when you
>> want to revert to the stable version.
> 
> I copied the pgfplots unstable package to
> ~/Library/texlive/2010/texmf-var, then called "sudo texhash". The
> following was returned:
> 
> texhash: Updating /usr/local/texlive/2010/../texmf-local/ls-R...
> texhash: Updating /usr/local/texlive/2010/texmf/ls-R...
> texhash: Updating /usr/local/texlive/2010/texmf-config/ls-R...
> texhash: Updating /usr/local/texlive/2010/texmf-dist/ls-R...
> texhash: Updating /usr/local/texlive/2010/texmf-var/ls-R...
> texhash: Done.
> 
> (Note that there is no mention of ~/Library/texlive/2010/texmf-var
> directory. Is this normal? Afterwards, trying a command from the
> unstable package gave me an error. So it does not seem to have
> installed correctly.
> 
> I then tried to copy the pgfplots folder to
> /usr/local/texlive/2010/texmf-var and run texhash again. But again,
> the pgfplots package did not seem to install correctly.
> 
> Can anybody help me diagnose the problem?
> 
> Thanks for your patience.

sudo texhash isn't required after updating the texmfvar tree, but it should do no harm. When you unzip pgfplots_unstable.tds.zip, you get a folder named pgfplots_unstable.tds. It is the contents of that folder that should be dragged into ~/Library/texlive/2010/texmf-var. When you open ~/Library/texlive/2010/texmf-var in the Finder, you should see at its top level folders named doc, scripts, source and tex. Is that how it appears?

Michael