TeX Live install calling cc?

[Richard Koch]

Folks,

Is there a circumstance when the script inside TeX Live which recreates formats would call cc?

I just got a strange message from a user who installed MacTeX-2018 on Apple's latest system Mojave. At the very end of installation, the system put up an error message saying "The 'cc' command requires the command line developer tools. Would you like to install the tools now?"

New Macs do not contain clang or other compilers. But many users install Apple's free development system, XCode, and get these compilers. Since XCode is very large, Apple also offers to install just the command line compiler and a few other tools, and makes this offer automatically if a user calls cc.

MacTeX unwraps TeX Live and writes the result to /usr/local/texlive/2018. It then calls a postinstall script which does a few things, but certainly doesn't call cc. MacTeX is set up for letter size paper, but if this script discovers that the user has a4 size paper, it calls tlmgr to switch paper size. I think that tlmgr call will remake formats.

I'm trying to figure out why this is the first time someone has written to me with this problem.

Richard Koch
koch at uoregon.edu