tinytex should not assume in can write to /usr/local/bin on Linux

[cboettig]

tinytex assumes it can write symlinks to /usr/local/bin. Issue #38 suggests that on MacOS, users typically have permissions to do so, and so perhaps this makes sense as the MacOS behavior. On Linux platforms, users don't typically have write permission to /usr/local/bin and it is often not desirable for regular users to modify /usr/local/bin.

For a bit of context: on Ubuntu, I cannot get tinytex installation to work following the root/multi-user recipe we'd worked out on the debian rocker stack (and is documented in the tinytex faq). I did a clean minimal texlive with a custom texlive profile, rocker-org/rocker-versioned2#10, that also puts texlive under /opt and grants users permissions there. In this setup, tinytex can still do it's magic of automatically installing necessary style files with tlmgr on rmarkdown::render, the only downside is we get a lot of 'false-alarm' error messages about not being able to write to `/usr/local/bin.

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[yihui]

Oh wait a second; 8cdaffd doesn't seem to be enough to suppress the messages. Hold on. I'll look further into it.

[yihui]

Should be fixed now. Thanks for the report!

[kaigu1990]

Hi, I have a same question.

I used this way wget -qO- "https://yihui.org/gh/tinytex/tools/install-unx.sh" | sh -s - --admin --no-path to install tinytex, and then added symlinks to /usr/local/bin. Then I found the lack of 'xcolor.sty', so tlmgr_search('xcolor.sty'), and tlmgr_install('xcolor').

But errors happened, add_link_dir_dir: destination /usr/local/bin not writable, no links from /home/rocheuser/.TinyTeX/bin/x86_64-linux. tlmgr: An error has occurred. See above messages. Exiting. add of symlinks had 1 error(s), see messages above.

Thanks!

Edit----------------------------------------
Sorry, it's my fault. By tlmgr(c('info', '--list', '--only-installed', '--data', 'name')), I find the xcolor is installed. So I just need to add symlinks to /usr/local/bin again. It's ok now!

Thanks!