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 ... ; 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; 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), 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 -) but luatex will make thinsg better (we hope) Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------