[tex-live] unix/windows inst, binaries

Gerben Wierda Gerben.Wierda at rna.nl
Sun Oct 10 10:41:15 CEST 2004


On 10 Oct 2004, at 01:16, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:

>>>>>> "Gerben" == Gerben Wierda <Gerben.Wierda at rna.nl> writes:
>
>> For older versions of Mac OS X you need bash because the scripts
>> of TL do not work with sh.
>
> Mac OS X TeX is derived from teTeX, AFAIK.  teTeX requires sh but not
> bash.  Some time ago I asked Thomas how to write portable shell
> scripts.  His answer was amazingly simple:
>
> Use the most ancient UNIX manual pages you can find.

As the person actually providing the probably most used redistribution 
of TeX on Mac OS X I can say that my distribution is not based on teTeX 
only. It is based on TeX Live for the programs, teTeX for the main 
texmf tree, with some additions by me. Other distributions, like the 
ones from fink and darwinports as far as I know are indeed based on 
teTeX.

But we are not talking about teTeX or TeX on Mac OS X. We are talking 
about TeX Live on Mac OS X. There I just provide the compiled binaries. 
But I do know that in the past the shell scripts of TeX Live did not 
work on older Mac OS X because it used a zsh based sh emulation and 
bash was not available.

So, to run scripts from the TL CD, on Mac OS X one needs bash. Older 
versions of Mac OS X do not come with bash.

G



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