[OS X TeX] Setting TEXINPUTS/BIBINPUTS on Catalina

[Ettore Aldrovandi]

> On Oct 19, 2020, at 06:01, Joseph Wright <joseph.wright at morningstar2.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> On 18/10/2020 14:27, Ettore Aldrovandi wrote:
>> 2. I keep my unique source in
>> 		~/Library/texmf/bibtex/bib/
>>     as others have stated, and it’s picked up automatically.
> 
> Well yes that was my fallback plan. However, it has two issues
> 
> - It makes it harder to simply zap ~/Library/texmf when you need to have a clean set up (to remove development files: something I need to do quite a bit)

Yes, that’s different. No concrete ideas, in that case, except for possibly making the files in it, or maybe the entire tree a target for an appropriate install command, keeping the sources somewhere else under version control. You could check out a development or stable branch and then install over.

> - It won't work for other variables (things like the EPOCH ones)
> 
> However, reading up it does seem Apple have made it very hard to set system-wide environmental variable :(
> 

Well, that’s a bit of a philosophical point. I think I like the idea to have few globally defined variables in general, as well as having subtrees where no one can write (not even root).  For variables, it’s not that bash or zsh make it intrinsically harder to set variables, even globally. In fact it’s easier. For zsh, what might be confusing is the plethora of initialization files it calls (or might not call, for that matter, like .login) and above all the order in which this happens. But /etc/zprofile (where the path is synthesized) and /etc/zshrc are read. It might even read /etc/zshenv, so you have options. The man page tells exactly what is read in which order. 

—Ettore

Ettore Aldrovandi
Department of Mathematics, Florida State University
1017 Academic Way                *   http://www.math.fsu.edu/~ealdrov
Tallahassee, FL 32306-4510, USA * * aldrovandi at math dot fsu dot edu
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://email.esm.psu.edu/pipermail/macosx-tex/attachments/20201019/bbce2ec9/attachment.htm>