Re: [therion-users] TeX paths

[Wookey]

On Tue 08 Apr, Stacho Mudrak wrote:
> After reinstalling therion on several computers several times, I agree, that
> installation process should be easier (without setting environment
> variables). It means doing following things:
> 
> 1. Therion should automatically search for other executable files it is
> using, if it can not find them with default settings. This is not very
> difficult task, and would work on 90% of all computers, because we can
> assume, that thpdf and theps2pdf are located where therion.exe is. Perl and
> TeX usually works from command line on UNIX, on Win32, there are may be five
> common installations . . .
> 
> 2. The THERION environment variable could be ignored, if we will assume some
> default location for therion library (e.g. /usr/share/therion or C:\Program
> files\therion\lib). 

This already works on Debian Linux - The therion.ini file is not needed for
a normal installation of survex and therion. 

> As far as I know, on Linux is standard /usr/share or /usr/local/share.
> Which would be better?

Check the LSB for details but on Debian /usr/share is the default place and
local system overrides go in /usr/local/share, so check /usr/local/share
first then /usr/share. I think that should be pretty standard everywhere
now.

> 
> 3. The TeX's (MPINPUTS and TEXINPUTS) could be probably written somehow to
> tex and mp file. I can write instead "input therion.tex" filename with the
> path "input /usr/local/share/therion/lib/tex/therion.tex". Than no TEXINPUTS
> is needed. Probably the same can be somehow done with MPOST.

This would work, but it seems 'better' to use the built-in config
mechanisms unless it is difficult to make it work (in case you needed
somehow to use the therion macros from an external TeX program - is that
possible or likely?). The default non-packaged version of therion could
keep it's /usr/{local}/share/therion/lib/ directory and use an explicit
path but packaged versions (deb and maybe rpm) should probably just put the
files in the right place.

> Do you have any other ideas?

Putting the therion TeX macros into /usr/share/texmf/tex/therion works fine
on Debian TeTeX so I will use that for the Debian version as it seems
'right'.

This probably works on nearly all Linux systems. We may need to use
explicit paths on some other unix systems?
 
I've just uploaded the first official Debian Therion package (0.2.9-1) to
the servers.  It should go into the unstable distribution in the next few days.

I'll do a 0.2.10 in a week or two.
 

Wookey
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