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

[Richard Koch]

The Programs directory you mention below was an addition by Jerome Laurens
to the data structure last year, i.e., 2014. You may recall that before
MacTeX-2014, the Preference Pane didn’t work with Mavericks. 
Just before the release of TeX Live 2014, Jerome wrote with a new version
which did work, and this change to the data structure.

Jerome and I exchanged some “hot” emaiil after that. I contended
that a last minute data structure change was dangerous. I believe Jerome
made the change to make possible additional features of the
Preference Pane, which have not yet materialized. 

Ultimately I concluded that the addition did no harm and accepted it,
thereby getting a fixed Pref Pane for Mavericks.

There are a few users who would like us to “clean up” the TeX
Dist data structure. I personally believe this is a waste of time,
but you should feel free to pursue the issue.

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.

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
>