Re: [NTG-context] TeX Live and ConTeXt MKIV installation and maintenance

On Sat, 12 Jul 2008, George N. White III wrote:

On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 6:37 PM, Aditya Mahajan wrote:

...

Is it possible to test texlive without uninstalling texlive2007 installed by a system package manager? Last time I tried texlive 2008, mkiv setup was reading texmf.cnf that came with system installed tl2007, and therefore could not find the correct files. I want to test tl2008, but at the moment cannot afford to uninstall tl2007.

I also realized that I had TEXMFCNF variable set, which was causing havoc with tl2008.

I have two versions of TL2007 (Red Hat's and one I maintain from the svn repo) and have been testing TL2008 without removing. TL is designed to work from a self-contained tree, but there are a few potential problems to watch for:

0. Some Windows GUI environments may store the information gleaned from the TeX configuration when they are first installed, so you need to check which versions are being used and be prepared to use command-line stuff if your editor makes bad choices. This can also be an issue with some *x GUI environments whre the app is started by the GUI and doesn't see changes to the path made in your current shell.

1. the default on is to have texlive/YYYY/texmf* trees with texlive/texmf-local available to all the versions. If you have put updates to TL2007 in your texmf-local, they may be older versions than those in TL2008. The same applies to updates in $HOME/texmf.

2. on *x be careful not to have the installer create symbolic links, e.g., in /usr/bin. You can then select the version you want by adjusting the PATH variable.

On *X I recommend the environment modules tools to manage your PATH. This is available in some linux distros, and comes with SGI Irix. Another approach that works on WIn32 and *x is to write a script that sets the path and loads a shell. Then you can use that for command-line processing, or start emacs from the command-line to use AUCTeX.

3. formats and configs may end up in $HOME/.texliveYYYY, which is OK if you are using only one install for a given year, but can cause problems if you end up with two installs for the same TL version. The solution is to make sure you use the <tool>-sys versions to put configs and formats into the system directories.

Thank you. I followed your instructions, and everything works perfectly. (Well, I did have to manually follow the post-install instructions from Taco). I only installed ConTeXt, american language and english documentation. ConTeXt works fine, but the only third party module that is installed in t-bib. Did I miss an option for installing ConTeXt third party modules, or are they not present currently? Aditya