[tex-live] tlmgr help formatting

[George N. White III]

On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 8:34 PM, Lars Madsen <daleif at imf.au.dk> wrote:

> It might be an idea to mention that in order for tlmgr to work properly then
> perldoc needs to be installed.
>
> for some reason my PCLinuxOS had perl but no perldoc, and then when I issued
>
> tlmgr help
>
> it would just list the tlmgr script itself, not the POD text.

I just installed Ubuntu 8.10 on a couple systems.   The standard configuration
did not include perldoc, so I too saw this behaviour.

> After installing perldoc, everything went fine again.
>
> Just in case it might help someone.
>
> BTW: great job on the new TL infrastructure, makes updating the LaTeX dist
> so much easier.
>
> BTW2: what happens on multi user systems if a user issues tlmgr? Would it be
> safer if that command only be available for the superuser?

For years I've been making the texlive tree owned by a user who is the TL
administrator.  tlmgr (together with tools like updmap and fmtutil)
are not things
that should ever be run as "root".   I would also not want to have two users
running tlmgr at the same time, so if that is a concern you might want to create
a special TL admin account where one user (the TL admin) does the updating.

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia