[tex-live] asy & texmf v texmf-local

[George N. White III]

On Fri, Aug 27, 2010 at 11:02 AM, Vladimir Lomov <lomov.vl at gmail.com> wrote:

> ** Will Robertson [2010-08-27 16:27:15 +0930]:
>
[...]
>>
>> On the other hand, just deleting the TL-installed asymptote.sty isn't too big of a deal, so the current situation is probably fine.
> You should choose one of the following:
> 1. you either use full TL with all it (old, not updated,...) utlities, or

A newer version may be needed because the one from TL is buggy or because
your colleague is using some feature from the new version in a document
on which you are coauthor.

> 2. compile some utilities by yourself but _remove_ apropriate packages
>  from TL.

This approach can run afoul of dependencies.   With some package managers
there is a way to create dummy packages to deal with this.

3.  arrange things so allow switching between the old and new versions.  For
binaries you can do this by choosing suitable directories and
adjusting the PATH,
but for texmf things you have to create a new tree and adjust texmf.cnf.

4.  on platforms that support hard links, just copy using "cp -lr" of
CTAN texlive
to a new location and overwrite the existing files with the new versions.  The
you only need to adjust the PATH to switch between the standard and modified
TL versions.


> I choose the second way. Some time ago I tried to live with TL texworks
> & asy but also compiled and installed them using my distro utility but
> this, of course, failed (bad interactions). So I simply delete
> apropriate packages from TL and all works fine.
>
> Note however, that in the second case the responsibility to update
> software is on your side. So you have to watch if software you manually
> install is updated.
>
> Also consider the following situation: you update asymptote and force it
> to put sty file into 'texmf' tree but asy binary to /usr/local/bin .
> Then suppose that TL updates asymptote package and overwrites sty file
> (not bad because the versions are the same) but then TL
> update asymptote again (or you forgot that you also have manually
> installed asymptote package) and then you going into trouble: version
> mismatch.

Such mismatched version are one of the top sources of problems for our
TeX users, although more often caused by someone copying file that belongs
in a texmf tree into the document directory.

You may want to have both versions available -- new to check
compatibility of existing
documents/templates before users start encountering problems or
because you need a
bug fix/feature in the new version, and old because you have
multi-author projects where
the other authors use the old version.

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