[tex-live] Directory structure

Karl Berry karl at freefriends.org
Thu Jan 19 20:39:03 CET 2006


Hi Peter,

    down to making the TL* installers use the same default each year? 

The Unix TL installer has used /usr/TeX every year since its inception
(I think) until last year.  So it's not a matter of it warping all
over the map.

I wanted to change it because, first, /usr/TeX seems like totally the
wrong place these days.

Second, having a static path was misleading -- installing release N in
/usr/TeX and then installing release N+1 in the same /usr/TeX has never
been a good idea at all.

The new location is /usr/local/texlive/YYYY, to ameliorate this.
Before, the documentation *recommended* that you change the default to a
path like that.  That seemed dumb, so I proposed changing the default in
the first place.

     "your TeX system (ie your texmf directory) is put at /usr/TeX"

But documentation could never have said that and be correct more than a
tiny fraction of the time.  The default is just the default.  In fact,
everyone I know changed it.

Also, it very much varies by platform -- probably c:\texmf (c:\tex?) is
the most common on windows, /usr/local/teTeX on Mac, and
/usr/{bin,share,...} on Linux (most people run the teTeX that came with
their system, rather than installing TeX Live on their own).

So I'm not sure what can be done here?

    can't get our act together on whereabouts to install it

It doesn't seem like a matter of getting acts together to me; there *is*
no location which will suit a plurality of sites.  In fact, it might be
better to have no default at all :).

    virtues of the TDS

Well, I like the TDS less every day :).

karl



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