Re: TeX Live and ConTeXt MKIV installation and maintenance

[Aditya Mahajan <adityam@umich.edu>]

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

> On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 6:37 PM, Aditya Mahajan <adityam@umich.edu> 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
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