Hans Hagen
Sanjoy Mahajan wrote:
A system-wide installation, if done cleanly, would be much easier (as plink pointed out). If you (or 'texexec --make' to generate the formats) ask kpathsea where to put the format files, it'll give you a directory in TEXMFHOME, so a per user install. But how do you ask kpathsea the correct question so that it'll tell you where they should go for a system-wide install?
you can't and i remember asking for such a feature but ... ;
Can you point me to this discussion? I think it doesn't need more as what fmtutil-sys, updmap-sys and texconfig-sys do before calling fmtutil, updmap or texconfig, respectively: v=`kpsewhich -var-value TEXMFSYSVAR` c=`kpsewhich -var-value TEXMFSYSCONFIG` TEXMFVAR="$v" TEXMFCONFIG="$c" export TEXMFVAR TEXMFCONFIG exec updmap ${1+"$@"} However, it would be probably more elegant and context-like to not have texexec and texexec-sys, but rather a commandline switch - in this case the handling would have to be done in the perl (or ruby?) scripts, which is somewhat trickier.
the only way to figure that out is to check all format paths and take the first one that fits; unfortunalty the tetex paths are rather messy so it's hard to predict in what permutation of home, usr, share, sys, opt * local * tex, TeX, teTeX, whatever * texmf, texmflocal, texmf-local, texmf-teTeX, texmf-dis, texmf.local, texmf-whocares * web2c, web2c/engine etc etc a format may end up;
I'm not sure what you mean. The default TEXMF path for teTeX (and I think also for TeXlive) is TEXMF = {!!$TEXMFCONFIG,!!$TEXMFVAR,$TEXMFHOME,!!$TEXMFSYSCONFIG,!!$TEXMFSYSVAR,!!$TEXMFMAIN,!!$TEXMFLOCAL,!!$TEXMFDIST} where the first three are per-user, the others are system trees. An explanation about installing does not need to know whether, for example, TEXMFLOCAL is called texmf.local or texmf-local or /usr/local/share/texmf. The only problem might be that some users change the order or the trees, but that's not a big problem if we suggest to use the default path.
this is further complicated by the fact that kpse has to do some guessing about where it's configuration files are (web2c, etc, home, nowhere),
This is only a problem if people have more than one texmf.cnf - is this actually the case? I don't think I ever heard of that.
what trees make sense, etc etc; and, yes, some of the paths are hard coded in the binaries, so relocating is tricky ... isn't it magic that tex still runs -)
AFAIK only the search path for texmf.cnf is hard-coded, and that can't be avoided. On the other hand, no one ever approached me and requested a relocation: What would you want, and in which cases? TIA, Frank -- Dr. Frank Küster Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)