[tex-live] TEXMFLOCAL vs. TEXMFMAIN

Karl Berry karl at freefriends.org
Sat Nov 17 01:37:21 CET 2007


      I can't understand why "$TEXMFMAIN" is given higher priority
    over "$TEXMFLOCAL" in the default definition of TEXMF in "texmf.in".

It's not a typo.  It was a decision made by Thomas which TL followed.
Here is what Thomas wrote (not to the list, but I trust he won't mind me
including it here!) the last time someone asked:


Date: Tue, 03 Apr 2007 14:38:22 +0200
From: Thomas Esser <te at dbs.uni-hannover.de>

In teTeX-3.0, TEXMFMAIN contains only the files that are copied during
"make install", e.g. very important and version dependend stuff such
as pdfetex.pool.

In my understanding, TEXMFLOCAL is ment to overrule stuff out of
TEXMFDIST, but the files contained in TEXMFMAIN are tightly related to
the distribution itself and should not be overruled.

[...]


More information about the tex-live mailing list