[tex-live] last minute

[Kaja P. Christiansen]

Staszek Wawrykiewicz writes:

 > It is not the case for "inst" which in turn generates all formats.

Interesting distinction. Maybe required formats could be determined 
on the basis of chosen collections. Nothing to do with this TL, though.

 > Anyway, you do not need to use fmtutil, just run latex foo and
 > format should be made on the fly

Sure, if you are a single PC user. But when I test a set up, I also 
look at this with the site maintainer's eyes; for a site with hundreds 
of machines, 3 architectures and lots of users, all formats must 
be made beforehand, so it's important to make a mental note that 
CD vs DVD installations are different in this respect.

 > We know that's texmf-local, as you wrote later. 

The point was that texmf-local is local by name :-) So throwing
empty 'local' directories into texmf-local seems unnecessary.
No big deal though.

 > Some people
 > persuaded that making a skeleton for users' local files would be handy.

I can understand that. We recommend $HOME/texmf for users' own styles, 
fonts etc. Having texmf-local as an example of how to structure 
$HOME/texmf is a big help for them.

 > (I keep my local files in texmf-var because it is more flexible,

I've used texmf-local for years (and before it was introduced on
TL under this name). It's a perfect placeholder for truly local stuff - 
proprietary fonts, local uni classes and docs, while texmf-var is 
used for dynamically generated stuff and anything else that can just 
go away at the next upgrade.

Kaja