[tex-live] [Fwd: Re: TeXLive Perl + latexmk (windows)]

[George N. White III]

On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 10:45 AM, Norbert Preining <preining at logic.at> wrote:

> On Mi, 14 Apr 2010, Philip TAYLOR wrote:
>> It is, I believe, a great mistake that TeX Live, too, assumes that
>> a single partition will be used to hold the whole of a TeX
>> installation, and makes no provision for storing the binaries
>> outside of the primary data hierarchy.  [I would be very happy

When TL is packaged by a linux distro there are policies that dictate
what type of file can go where.   In addition to the CTAN installer
there are debian/Ubuntu and Fedora installers:

<http://packages.ubuntu.com/lucid/texlive>
<http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/TeXLive>

Maybe Microsoft has seen the light:

"Now this is interesting. Microsoft developer Garrett Serack has
acknowledged that it is generally easier to roll out a, for instance,
complex stack of open source server software on Linux than it is on
Windows. He also offers a solution - he's working on a project to
bring package management to Windows. This project will be
community-driven, and Serack has the full blessing from Microsoft." --
<http://www.osnews.com/story/23131/Microsoft_Aims_to_Bring_apt_rpm-like_Tools_to_Windows>

> That will not happen, as the search path and the primary texmf.cnf is
> found according to the location of the binaries.

It is a useful feature that CTAN TL can live entirely under a single
top-level directory, but there are problems for sites that want to put the
data on a shared "folder" but also have "no execute" policies for
such folders.  Given that disk is cheap and more and more people
rely on laptops, I suspect most sites use the shared directory for a
local cache of the archives with TL installed to local disk.

If someone wants to enforce a policy, they need to implement the
policy in tools or the end result will be chaos with the files in different
"areas" getting out of sync after updates.   Linux has two "proof of
concept" examples showing that it can be done, so it is up to the
Windows community to help Serack get it done.

> You still of course can move TEXMFLOCAL whereever you want ...

Or just use debian linux.

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