Re: rationale of texmf-dist

Thomas Esser <[email protected]> schrieb:

>> 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). 
>
> Please, keep things separate, I think this is a win for everybody. I
> suggest the following scheme:
>   TEXMFMAIN=/var/lib/texmf
>   VARTEXMF=/var/lib/texmf
>   TEXMFDIST=/usr/share/texmf
> and /etc/texmf with config files (with symlinks in /var/lib/texmf).
>
> By setting VARTEXMF, you make sure that no generated files end up in
> $TEXMFDIST (e.g. fonts).

I don't understand - in this setup, texmf-dist is not used, and
TEXMFMAIN is the same as VARTEXMF?

One further question -- I'm assuming that something's gotten wrong above
and you recommend using texmf-dist in some way: I was wondering where
other Debian packages should put their TeX input files. 

Currently, i.e. together with tetex-2.0.2, they put them under
TEXMFMAIN=/usr/share/texmf where also tetex resides, since LOCALTEXMF is
for the local admin, not for files coming with the (Debian)
distribution. If tetex moves (mainly) to TEXMFDIST=
/usr/share/texmf-dist, they could move, too. Or they could stay in
TEXMFMAIN. Thus they could use updated versions of files without causing
conflicts in the package managment system.

I think it's mainly our choice, but I'd like to hear whether using texmf
vs. texmf-dist for this distinction would be a misuse, as you designed
it, or not.

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