[tex-live] reliability of ~/texmf in TeXLive and other distros?

[Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard]

Hi,

Norbert Preining a écrit :
> I would suggest:
> 	cp sagetex.sty `kpsewhich -expand-var '$TEXMFHOME'`/tex/latex/sagetex
> that should work on all different platforms and under different 
> assumptions.
> 
I agree. It'll work on any TeX Live, MacTeX or teTeX installation AFAIK.

>>     texhash ~/texmf/
> 
> That is probably *counterproductive* since
> 	TEXMFHOME
> is searched without the ls-R database, so you only might create
> problems here.
> 
+1

> FOr TEXMFLOCAL it is the same AFAIR.
> 
I'm afraid not. TEXMFLOCAL uses ls-R database.

> (That is at least since TeX Live 2005 the way (AFAIR))
> 
I confirm concerning TEXMFHOME (my university still runs 2005 on some servers).

Concering mktexlsr, I think the best you can do is call it without argument, ad
ignore the errors: it will try to refresh the database for all trees needing a
database, but will skip system trees if user doesn't have enough permissions to
write there.


To sum up, I'd do (pseudo-code):

if user is root or system-wide installation was requested:
	TREE = TEXMFLOCAL
else
	TREE = TEXMFHOME
endif
installpath = `kpsewhich --var-value TREE`
mkdir -p installpath
cp sagetex.sty installpath
mktexlsr 2>/dev/null


Manuel.