[tex-live] Where is the root dir of my Tex Live installation

Lars Madsen daleif at imf.au.dk
Sat Nov 16 08:24:08 CET 2013


Sounds reasonable regarding the linking.

The thing I'd like to see in TL is some script or what ever that will take care if the equivs stuff (or how ever you are doing that trick). There are many Ubuntu vanilla TL users, and most of them find the equivs stuff confusing (even though, the recipe on Tug.org is easy to follow)

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-----Original Message-----
From: Scott Kostyshak [skostysh at lyx.org]
Received: lørdag, 16 nov. 2013, 3:38
To: Lars Madsen [daleif at imf.au.dk]
CC: ubuntu at pechoc.eu [ubuntu at pechoc.eu]; tex-live at tug.org [tex-live at tug.org]
Subject: Re: [tex-live] Where is the root dir of my Tex Live installation

Hi Lars,

Thanks for the comments. See my responses in-line.

On Fri, Nov 15, 2013 at 5:59 PM, Lars Madsen <daleif at imf.au.dk> wrote:
> Scott, I noticed that you mention on the Web page at it installs or at least
> links the installation where Ubuntu would have installed it.
>
> Then what when people want to uninstaller? Fx we do not really encourage
> users to use the "link into usual places" feature because people tend to
> forget they made them and end up in a lot of mess.

I'm surprised that no one has put a feature request for an uninstaller
yet. However, I don't see how the linking in particular poses a
problem. The uninstaller would just delete the link. Let me explain
more the purpose of the linking. I'm not trying to fool Ubuntu into
thinking that TeX Live is in the same location as it would have been
if installed from the repositories. I'm informing TeX Live (the manual
install) of the location where many auxiliary LaTeX packages would be
installed with an "apt-get". Please let me know if you want more of an
explanation or if you have suggestions for how to improve things
(perhaps you are suggesting that not doing the linking at all would be
an improvement?).

The following is what the linking does:

dTEXMFLOCAL=""

if [ "${LINK_UBUNTU}" = 1 ]; then
    cd "$(kpsewhich -var-value TEXMFLOCAL)/tex/"
    ln -s "/usr/share/texmf/tex/" "UbuntuTexDir"
fi

> Other than that interesting idea.
>
> Please consider submitting some of this to the tl project to make life
> easier for (some) users.

I'm happy to work with anyone. However, I think that install-tl-ubuntu
and the TeX Live project have different goals. My interpretation (and
I wouldn't be surprised if I misunderstood something here) is that the
TeX Live project wants to encourage users to have a non-automated and
flexible TeX Live installation, which should be done after reading the
TeX Live Guide, or perhaps only the Quick install guide. I think this
is the correct approach and would not want things to be different.
There are also the TeX Live packages in the Ubuntu repository but I
don't know if those are encouraged or not.

My goals with install-tl-ubuntu are automation and simplicity, at the
cost of some hackishness and assumptions (although install-tl-ubuntu
does provide a fair amount of options, doing a manual install is far
more flexible). I think this approach is less "correct" but is liked
by many users of Ubuntu who do not want to spend the time reading and
understanding the installation steps and are just looking for
something that pretty much works and that integrates with other parts
of Ubuntu (e.g. apt); or are looking for something that can be put on
autopilot.

I am very interested in any feedback and suggestions. I know little
about TeX Live and proper installation. Despite this lack of
expertise, I continue to suggest the install-tl-ubuntu script as an
option to consider because the feedback that I've gotten is that it
has indeed made things simple for users.

Thanks again for your comments,

Scott

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