Re: rationale of texmf-dist

Sebastian Rahtz <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 27, 2004 at 07:43:24PM +0100, Frank K?ster wrote:
>> 
>> I'm wondering what the reason for the creation of the additional
>> hierarchy texmf-dist is. If everything (nearly everything) from the
>> tetex distribution goes into this directory, what's the difference
>> between $TEXMFLOCAL and $TEXMFMAIN?
>> 
>
> texmf is for system-dependent material (pool files, config files)
> texmf-dist is for the public system-indepedent packages
> texmf-local is for local configuration and private changes
> texmf-var is a cache of files which are created automatically
>
> make sense?

Hm, does this mean: texmf-dist can be on a network volume shared by many
machines, but each can have its format files (e.g. with lots of
hyphenation patterns on one system, with a minimal set on the other) in
texmf? 

I still doubt whether we will adopt this in Debian, because of the
filesystem hierarchy standard / LSB. $TEXMFMAIN traditionally resides in
/usr/share/, but most of the directories or files in it will be symlinks
to /etc/texmf/* (for configuration files) or /var/lib/texmf (for
$TEXMFMAIN/web2c and others). 

Thank you, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster, Biozentrum der Univ. Basel
Abt. Biophysikalische Chemie