[OS X TeX] Re: Installing unstable packages

[Herbert Schulz]

On Feb 17, 2011, at 7:48 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.
> 

Howdy,

I would have copied it to ~/Library/texmf/tex/latex/ which is where you should put personal packages. I'm not sure if it will be found in ~/Library/texlive/2010/texmf-var/ but maybe if you placed it in ~/Library/texlive/2010/texmf-var/tex/latex/. The texmf-var branch is usually used for local configuration data rather than a package location. It is definitely true that texhash/mktexlsr doesn't create ls-R files in the personal trees (ones located in ~).

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest dot com)