creating MacTeX links to MacPorts TeXLive

[Faisal Moledina]

>>> .....Ah. Then /usr/texbin is not the bin directory, it's the prefix. So you'd really have /usr/texbin/bin being a symlink to wherever the TeX binaries are, and /usr/texbin/man (or perhaps more correctly /usr/texbin/share/man) for the manpages, /usr/texbin/info (or perhaps /usr/texbin/share/info) for the infopages.
>>
>> No, weirdly enough, /usr/texbin is where binaries are located, and
>> within that is a man dir. I've just emailed MacTeX to help clarify the
>> final path structure.
>
>
>>> The user either needs /usr/texbin in their PATH, or they have it in /etc/paths.d; it's superfluous to do both.
>>>
>>
>> Ack, I do have it twice in my path as a result. This is messier than I
>> expected at first. MacTeX does recommend prepending PATH with
>> /usr/texbin if you use Fink or MacPorts, which makes sense to me. The
>> paths.d is the default approach for non-Fink or MacPorts MacTeX users.
>
> Ok. And you may not be the only user who has done that. So I guess we should accommodate either method. Whatever the desired structure is for the texbin directory, however odd it may be, we can duplicate it in the texlive ports.

I just received a response from Richard Koch MacTeX. He says:

"The man and info links are present for the future, but as far as I
know aren't currently used by any software.

Note that on Snow Leopard, there is a heuristic to help find man
pages. If you type, say,

       man latex

then terminal finds out where latex is, and then looks in the same
directory for a man page or man directory. (There are other steps for
the heuristic, but
that's the important one.)

In TeX Live 2010, the binary directory contains a symbolic link named
man pointing to the man pages. That's how MacTeX assumes man pages
will be found on Snow Leopard. (Other more complicated methods, not
obsolete, are used on Tiger)."

Therefore, without making it unnecessarily complicated, let's just see
if texlive ports can symlink binaries to a texbin dir, which I can
submit to MacTeX as the location that /usr/texbin should link to. This
need not occur ASAP since TeXLive 2010 is already released and this
modification may or may not be released on the web version.

Faisal