[2523] in testers
Re: Athena 7.7 and LaTeX
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (bert@master.grad.hr)
Tue Jun 28 14:18:28 1994
To: Dorothy Bowe <dot@MIT.EDU>
Cc: testers@MIT.EDU, bug-sipb@MIT.EDU
Cc: yandros@MIT.EDU, bert@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: dot's message of "Mon, 27 Jun 94 11:19:16 EDT."
<9406271519.AA26124@pianoforte.MIT.EDU>
Date: Tue, 28 Jun 94 20:12:14 +0100
From: bert@master.grad.hr
(First of all, I corrected "sipb-staff" to "bug-sipb", which is the
preferred address for bug reports for SIPB locker. If I wasn't 4000
miles away, maybe I'd perform an armed takeover of "tex-gurus" now. =) )
> I'm not sure whose responsibility it is to fix this,
Well, I don't know either, but it was my responsibility to break it. =)
(I created the current directory scheme for release 7.7, and am helping
to maintain SIPB's TeX configuration.)
So I'll comment some. [I can't really fix it from over here...]
> some of the LaTeX files changed location in 7.7, ...
> I also don't know why they moved. (Anyone have the answer to that question?)
They moved because having all those files in the same, flat directory
was a pain in the wrist. It was all a gross jumbled mess, since it's
too large to handle, and a lot of historical cruft never got removed.
(Some of the files were used with TEX78, the predecessor of current TeX.
FYI, TEX87 was made obsolete by TeX in 1982. =) ) As a consultant,
I was often annoyed by the complete impossibility of finding anything
there. The new directory structure was an attempt to fix these problems,
since the new version of TeX can search subdirectories authomatically.
> sipb links won't work for both 7.6 and 7.7 with the current arrangement
> of files.
I'll admit that I never thought of this. However, I believe the
problem can be fixed from the SIPB side by simply removing the
link farm. Users should end their TEXINPUTS settings with a :
which will make TeX look in the default inputs path after all
the directories in the TEXINPUTS path, and things will be happy.
Therefore, my suggestions to fix this problem are as follows:
For SIPB, to
(1) check if the hanging symlinks break TeX if TEXINPUTS are set to
something like
/mit/sipb/lib/tex/macros:
or
/mit/sipb/lib/tex/macros:/usr/athena/lib/tex/macros//
(the two trailing slashes are important!)
(2) if they do, discuss if the symlink farm actually serves any purpose
(and I can't see any)
(3) if it doesn't, blow away the links from /mit/sipb/lib/tex/macros
to /usr/athena/lib/tex/macros
(Can someone do this? I really really really can't.)
For rel-eng, to edit the TeX and LaTeX manpages to indicate that
TEXINPUTS should end in : to retain the default search path (or contain an
empty component somewhere else-- foo:bar: foo::bar and :foo:bar all DTRT,
but differ in the order of searching for files).
[Alternatively, rel-eng could just make the files go in a single directory
again, but I'd consider that a stupid move.]
I hope this was useful in some way, shape or form...
--bert, who's using computers only to play PC games these days
bert@mit.edu
P.S. Chad: thanks for dealing!
