Re: Package management

On Wed, Apr 15, 2015 at 10:48 AM, Ulrike Fischer <[email protected]> wrote:

> Am Wed, 15 Apr 2015 15:12:37 +0200 (CEST) schrieb Christoph
> Weidmann:
>
> > Hello Paul,
> > with Win7 the user concept is pretty more like linux than before.
> > Each "standard" user does not have write / installation permissions.
> > If you used default settings in the setup, your users could only add
> > packages / do updates if they start the MikTeX Tolls with the "(admin)"
> > extensions (see miktex01.jpg).
>
> I can't believe this. In a multiuser installation miktex creates a
> UserInstall root in the profile of the user which is used by the
> on-the-fly installation. I never heard that on-the-fly  or the
> update of packages installed on-the-fly failed if the users don't
> have admin rights.
>

Here, a MiKTeX package installed "on the fly" by a user with admin rights
can't be updated with a newer version if the user no longer has admin
rights.
I'm not sure if a different (non-admin) user could install an on-the-fly
update.

All these rights are configurable in group policies.  Large organizations
often have complicated tweaks to group policies,  At my workplace,
we get PC's with "corporate standard" images.  This images are supposed to
provide a uniform environment, but in practice the configuration details
are not identical.  When you get a new PC you have limited "admin"
privileges for a couple weeks to install applications and fonts you need.
There is also a mechanism where you can be granted temporary admin trights
to run a particular installer.  There are also ongoing tweaks to the
configuration, with the result that random configuration files for
user-installed apps start giving "access denied" errors. So far, I have
been able to work around these problems by reinstalling applications that
have non-admin install options, or by making an archive of a working
installation on another system and extracting over the broken
configuration.


>
> And when on-the-fly works for normal users why should it not be
> possible to install packages in UserInstall manually with non-admin
> version of the tools?
>

At my workplace, different PC models have different images with the
same "look and feel" (Corporate logos on login screen and desktop,
acceptable use policy click "OK" panels, etc.) but subtle differences
in things like whether admin privs are needed to run Event Viewer.
All this leads to massive confusion for both users and support staff.

I've pretty much given up on MiKTeX in favor of TeX Live.  Disk
is cheap, so just install (without admin) TeXLive full into
C:\<corporate_name>, which is set up to allow access to all users and makes
it easy for IT support to find.  Each user has to manually add the bin
directory to the User PATH.


-- 
George N. White III <[email protected]>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia
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