Suggestion to support TeXDist symlink creation on Macs out-of-the-box

[jfbu]

Hi Mojca

Le 30 mars 2019 à 19:47, Mojca Miklavec <mojca.miklavec.lists at gmail.com> a écrit :

>  From the console it works out of the box without editing
> bash profile.

In my experience the kpsewhich --var-value is slow on Mac OS.

As a result although I do my have own customized TeXDist structure
which I maintain myself from year to year I do have extra
set-up in my .bash_profile which looks like this

TEXDISTRIBCONTENTS="/Library/TeX/Distributions/.DefaultTeX/Contents"
export TEXMFSYSVAR="`cd -P $TEXDISTRIBCONTENTS/TexmfSysVar && pwd`"
export TEXMFLOCAL="`cd -P $TEXDISTRIBCONTENTS/TexmfLocal && pwd`"
# # Thus:
export TEXMFDIST="`cd -P $TEXDISTRIBCONTENTS/Root/texmf-dist && pwd`"
# # pour TL2013,14,15 texmf et texmf-dist identiques.
export TEXMFMAIN="`cd -P $TEXDISTRIBCONTENTS/AllTexmf/texmf && pwd`"
export SYSTEXMF="$TEXMFSYSVAR:$TEXMFLOCAL:$TEXMFDIST"
export TEXMFHOME="/Users/xxxxxxxxxx/Library/texmf"

This was some years back absolutely needed when loading of
AUCTeX in Emacs would make something like 9 calls to kpsewhich
which ended up in a freeze of Emacs for seconds at each
initial opening of a buffer window foo.tex.

Also, e.g. in my build script for xint I see 

# as kpsewhich is very slow (.5s) I want to evaluate once only.
installlocal: xint.tds.zip
	$(eval $@_tmp := $(TEXMF_local))
	unzip xint.tds.zip -d $($@_tmp) && texhash $($@_tmp)


for the same reason.

Now perhaps this is obsolete information.

The drawback of the above is that if I switch distribution
I need to open a new Terminal and/or quit and relaunch Emacs to
fetch the new environment (maybe there is better Emacs way,
I work with limited knowledge of the best way to use it; I know
my build (https://github.com/railwaycat/homebrew-emacsmacport)
incorporates an import of shell environment at start, not sure
about others -- I recall it was a problem say 10 years ago
on the Mac)

Best,

Jean-François