[tex-live] TL 2005 post-installation questions

Itay Furman lists.texlive at itayf.fastmail.fm
Fri May 5 22:00:01 CEST 2006


On Thu, 4 May 2006, Karl Berry wrote:

> Date: Thu, 4 May 2006 18:45:05 -0500
> From: Karl Berry <karl at freefriends.org>
> To: lists.texlive at itayf.fastmail.fm
> Cc: tex-live at tug.org
> Subject: Re: [tex-live] TL 2005 post-installation questions
> 
> Hello Itay,

Hello Karl and thank you for your reply.

>
>    I am trying to understand the purpose of the TEX*CONFIG trees.
>
> texmf.cnf has these comments:
> % TEXMFVAR, where texconfig stores variable runtime data.
> % TEXMFCONFIG, where texconfig stores configuration data.
>
> % TEXMFSYSVAR, where texconfig-sys stores variable runtime data.
> % TEXMFSYSCONFIG, where texconfig-sys stores configuration data.
>
> As I recall, TEXMF*VAR is stuff which might get written more or less at
> any time, like .map and .fmt files (so I guess the comment above is not
> the whole story, actually).  TEXMF*CONFIG is for stuff which is altered
> only by running texconfig, like paper sizes and such.
>

As I understand it, paper sizes and such are configuration data 
that a user/administrator would probably like to persist between 
upgrades (the equivalent of *nix /etc ?) and not redo when a new 
texlive distribution comes out.  If true, then 
/usr/local/texlive/texmf-local sounds to me like a more natural 
place for those, than /usr/local/texlive/2005/texmf-config/. But 
probably I miss here something about the functionality of 
texconfig-sys and friends.

Thanks for the rest of your comments.

 	Itay



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