[OS X TeX] Adding TL'21 (pretest) to TeX Live Utility/texbin

[Joseph Wright]

Hello Dick,

> To set up the full /Library/TeX/texbin, you should install using the MacTeX package.

In the past (last time I had a Mac), the texbin stuff was a simple 
symlink, so it was trivial to do by hand. I take it life has got more 
complex.

[MacTeX is great for most users, of course, but as it's a wrapper around 
vanilla TL, if one mainly wants TL + the TLU, doing things by hand has 
the advantage of avoiding a 5Gb single file download from the pretest 
servers. Also vanilla is always there first by a day or two :)]

> For the pretest, you can get the same effect by just creating a symbolic link /Library/TeX/texbin pointing to /usr/local/texlive/2021/bin/universal-darwin. Some things will fail this way: you cannot use TLU to switch to the old distribution, and TeXShop's new item leading you to TeX Live documentation won't work.

I took a look at the structures, but they seemed much more intricate 
than in the past. Is the set up documented somewhere? (Used to be I 
think /etc/paths.d/texbin was all that had to be fiddled with.)

> Eventually we will create a small install package which installs the full mactex data structure for folks who use the Unix installer, but for that you need to wait until the release of TeX Live 2021.

Ah, that would be handy. I guess I'm thinking that if one is happy 
installing vanilla TL from the Terminal, a few shell scripts or a 
'recipe' should be workable :)

Joseph