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

[Siep Kroonenberg]

On Mon, Apr 01, 2019 at 06:37:06PM +0200, Siep Kroonenberg wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 31, 2019 at 03:40:24PM -0600, Karl Berry wrote:
> >     When I click "Specify directories", it says that the installer
> >     cannot write to /usr/local/share/man, but that's just because that
> >     folder doesn't exist. Shouldn't the installer attempt to create that
> >     directory instead of saying that it's not able to write it?
> > 
> > I don't know if the GUI code is doing its own writable checks, but in
> > the text installer, I can't reproduce this. I tried specifying putting
> > symlinks in a test directory /opt/tl/local/bin (with o l), where neither
> > that nor /opt/tl/local existed, and the installer dutifully created
> > both directories. /opt/tl itself has to be writable.
> > 
> > In tlpkg/TLUtils.pm, function add_link_dir_dir, the second line calls
> > mkdirhier on the destination. If that fails, it's supposed to write a
> > warning (two lines down). If it succeeds, and -w still fails, that is
> > odd. Maybe you could put in some debugging messages to see what's
> > happening in your case ... -k
> 
> The GUI does its own checking in this case. The idea is to put
> symlinks in directories where the system will look for them. To me
> it makes no sense to create such directories if they are not already
> there.

I relaxed this test in the GUI anyway: now the target directory
should either be writable outright, or be creatable from a few
levels up. The back end takes care of the actual creation.

-- 
Siep Kroonenberg