I use both MacPorts TeXLive and MacTeX from time to time. MacTeX comes with a handy System Preferences panel that allows you to choose which TeX distribution you want to use (i.e. TeXLive 2010 and TeXLive 2009 if you have both installed from tug.org). The MacTeX postflight installation script also creates links to other TeX distributions so that one can easily switch between MacTeX and others. Some examples include gwTeX 2003-2005, Fink-teTeX, and the old MacPorts-teTeX. I decided to help update the postflight script to link to MacPorts TeXLive ports, called MacPorts-TeXLive. I've pasted the relevant portion of the postflight script at http://pastie.org/1208204 and I was wondering if other MacTeX users or anyone in general can check to make sure that I haven't missed anything.
Note that doing this doesn't alter anything in /opt/local. It just sets up links in /usr/texbin to the appropriate location. The main disadvantage that I see is that because MacPorts installs TeXLive binaries in /opt/local/bin, when this TeX distribution is selected, /usr/texbin would link to /opt/local/bin. Since /usr/texbin is typically recommended to be prepended to $PATH, this would cause issues for people who do not want MacPorts binaries to take precedence over system ones (i.e. Perl). I'm not sure how to deal with that apart from making a texlive-bin somewhere in /opt/local (opt/local/bin/texlive ?) that would be linked to the TeX Distributions System Preferences panel instead of /opt/local/bin. Having said that, I'm not sure how much effort MacPorts texlive* port maintainers are interested in putting in doing that. I'm interested in hearing what others think of this approach. For me, I normally like the simplicity and all-in-one approach that MacPorts offers. However, I also like to keep up with new XeTeX features, making it handy to use MacTeX whenever necessary. This is especially the case if I want to use tlmgr, which is not recommended with MacPorts for obvious reasons. Faisal Moledina _______________________________________________ macports-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/macports-users
