Suggestion to support TeXDist symlink creation on Macs out-of-the-box

[Karl Berry]

    When I click "Specify directories", it says that the installer
    cannot write to /usr/local/share/man, but that's just because that
    folder doesn't exist. Shouldn't the installer attempt to create that
    directory instead of saying that it's not able to write it?

I don't know if the GUI code is doing its own writable checks, but in
the text installer, I can't reproduce this. I tried specifying putting
symlinks in a test directory /opt/tl/local/bin (with o l), where neither
that nor /opt/tl/local existed, and the installer dutifully created
both directories. /opt/tl itself has to be writable.

In tlpkg/TLUtils.pm, function add_link_dir_dir, the second line calls
mkdirhier on the destination. If that fails, it's supposed to write a
warning (two lines down). If it succeeds, and -w still fails, that is
odd. Maybe you could put in some debugging messages to see what's
happening in your case ... -k

(TLUtils.pm)

sub add_link_dir_dir {
  my ($from,$to) = @_;
  my ($ret, $err) = mkdirhier ($to);
  if (!$ret) {
    tlwarn("$err\n");
..