[tex-live] binaries in texlive/texmf-local/bin?

George N. White III gnwiii at gmail.com
Sat May 26 17:50:46 CEST 2007


On 5/26/07, Hartmut Henkel <hartmut_henkel at gmx.de> wrote:

> normally i throw freshly compiled local binaries (pdftex, metapost,
> luatex) just into texlive/2007/bin/<architecture> where they overwrite
> the original ones, which is somehow messy. Is there some way instead to
> put them into texlive/texmf-local/bin, so that the rest of the
> texlive/2007 tree can still be used?

Why is it messy to replace old binaries?

One reason to keep old binaries is for situations  where you want to
compare a new version against the release version.  You have to
worry about pool files and formats as well as the binaries.

Another reason is to use updates with a texlive/2007 tree mounted
read-only (e.g., via NFS share or a loop mount of the "live" .iso
file).

On linux, one way to handle versioning is with the unionfs
<http://www.am-utils.org/project-unionfs.html>
which allows you to overlay new versions over
an existing tree.  This is slated to become part of the standard
linux kernel, but at present you have to patch the kernel sources
unless it is included in your distro (many "live" distros use
unionfs to overlay the read-only filesystem with a writable
ram-based filesystem so you can run with patches applied
in a startup script)

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia


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