[OS X TeX] TeX Live 2015 and MacTeX-2015

[Alan Munn]

(Apologies if this is a duplicate; the first version didn’t seem to make it.)

On Jun 23, 2015, at 1:04 PM, Richard Koch <koch at uoregon.edu> wrote:

> 
> On the other hand, the change to a replacement for /usr/texbin is essential
> for El Capitan, and I do hope that /Library/TeX/texbin will be accepted
> without discussion, since it will affect the configuration of lots of
> GUI programs.

Hi Dick, first off, thanks as always for all the work you do on MacTeX. It’s clear that TL 2015 is now perfectly prepared for El Capitan and its prohibition on writing to /usr directly. Do you know what will happen to users who have pre-TL 2015 systems but who upgrade to El Capitan?

I can see two possibilities: 

A. everything that used to work still works, because /usr is not touched
B.  older distributions will fail to work at all because /usr/texbin isn’t there anymore after the upgrade

Obviously if the answer is A, then there’s no potential problems for older distributions on newer OS.

But if the answer is B, is there a simple solution to allow users with older distributions to keep using those distributions with the new link?  

If it’s just a matter of making a new link, a clickable script might help a lot of the more Terminal-phobic folk.

Alan



> 
> But as to where /Library/TeX/texbin points next, I really don’t care!
> 
> Dick Koch
> 
> 
>> On Jun 21, 2015, at 1:20 PM, jfbu <jfbu at free.fr> wrote:
>> 
>> a bit of my context: the extras in my installation are from MacTeX 2014,
>> but recently as I had already the pretest of TeXLive 2015 installed,
>> when official version was released I did only a few adjustments
>> but did not download MacTeX 2015, (I know I am missing some bounties
>> like extra support in Ghostscript for far east languages)
>> thus my experience with TeX Dist Preference Pane might be at odds
>> with the latest version.
>> 
>> on my system /usr/texbin was a symlink to
>> 
>> /Library/TeX/Distributions/Programs/texbin
>> 
>> the latter itself a symlink
>> 
>> Anticipating the possible upgrade to El Capitan next fall,
>> I thus suppressed /usr/texbin symlink, then created the similar one
>> in /Library/TeX/ and updated accordingly /etc/paths.d/TeX
>> 
>> This process left me with two mutually contradictory questions:
>> 
>> 1) if the Programs/ repertory is to serve anything, shouldn't
>> /Library/TeX/texbin be a symlink to it rather than to
>> sub-element Programs/texbin ?
>> 
>> 2) as I see nothing in this Distributions/Programs/, so it
>> should not hurt if I define the /Library/TeX/texbin symlink
>> to point directly to
>> /Library/TeX/Distributions/.DefaultTeX/Contents/Programs/texbin
>> which is the thing which the TeXDist Preference Pane updates
>> whenever one uses it to switch distributions
>> 
> 
> 
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--
Alan Munn
alanbmunn at gmx.com

-- 
Alan Munn
amunn at gmx.com