[tex-live] reliability of ~/texmf in TeXLive and other distros?

[Dan Drake]

Hello,

I have a question about using ~/texmf to install new style files. I'm
the author of SageTeX [1], which allows integrating the mathematical
software Sage [2] into LaTeX files. Sage (for the purposes of this
discussion) is a Python application, and SageTeX requires a Python
module be available to Sage, and a package be available to LaTeX.

We'll soon be distributing SageTeX with Sage by default, and we'd like
to have a reasonable way to install the package so that LaTeX can find
it. I'd like to simply do something like this in a script:

    cp sagetex.sty ~/texmf/tex/latex/sagetex/
    texhash ~/texmf/

but I don't know to what extent I can rely on TeXLive looking in ~/texmf
by default. I installed TL 2009 and it does this, but does anyone here
know the typical setup for major Linux distributions? For *BSD? For OS X
or Solaris? (I'm not worrying about Windows for now.)

Also, while this is a TeXLive list, what sort of defaults exist for
other common TeX distributions? Do you have any general advice for
automatically installing LaTeX packages when the user is not root?

Thanks for your help!

Dan

  1. http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/sagetex.html
  2. http://sagemath.org

-- 
---  Dan Drake
-----  http://mathsci.kaist.ac.kr/~drake
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