On 30 May 2002, Michael John Downes wrote: > Thomas Esser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > [lots of good information] > > > Hope, this is helpful somehow... > > Thank you, it is very helpful. I am trying to work out some ideas for > dealing with ongoing texmf-related upgrades of various kinds on a > multi-user system and I hope to write up my thoughts pretty soon in > the form of an online article that anyone can read who wants to. But in > the process of doing this I realized that I needed to better understand > the origins and intent of some things like VARTEXFONTS and VARTEXMF.
Another way to think about /var and VARXXXX is to consider the situation where the texmf tree is read-only (on CD-ROM or a network file server shared among many users). The 'var' refers to persistant writable space (as opposed to /tmp) needed by an application. With a linux distribution it makes sense to treat the vendor-supplied TeX distribution as "read-only" so you don't have to save locally applied changes when updating or reinstalling a distribution, and so that all the workstations in a group have the same software base. On a multi-user system it is very useful to have several TeX configurations. In most cases you need one very stable configuration and others for testing patches that you don't want to inflict on all users or with different defaults (e.g., dvips map files using URW vs Adobe Type 1 fonts). A common situation is one person working on a collaboration with an outside group who needs a TeX configuration synced with that of the outside group. The TEXMFCNF variable can be used to select among multiple configurations by pointing to different web2c directories with customized texmf.cnf files. If you don't establish this policy, you will end up with users setting TEXINPUTS and other variables which makes it difficult to track down problems. -- George White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Halifax, Nova Scotia
