On Sep 11, 2008, at 5:41 PM, Jan Michael wrote:
Many Thanks! But shouldn't this have worked without the symbolic link?
Yes and no. Frontends like Textmate don't go through the same initialization process as the shell does, so they don't get to know about the value of the PATH variable you see when you try a command in the shell. So for instance you can try the following and it will also work: Remove the symbolic link, close textmate, and on the terminal do "open -a TextMate". This will start TM as a child of the terminal, and hence inheriting the terminal's shell variables. It will then know about your PATH setting, and should be able to find tex just as you do from the terminal. But since TM is not run this way typically, it doesn't know about that.
So given that we can't rely on the shell variables for locating the tex installation, we rely on a series of heuristic checks. The first is looking for /usr/texbin, which has been now accepted as the location of the tex install by the mac community. By this I mean that the MacTeX installation creates the necessary symbolic link there, and other programs can rely on it being there for anyone installing TeX via MacTeX. That is why things were working for you earlier. When you did the migration though, none of the agents involved in the migration process knew about the symlink, so it was not created.
Now, returning to the issue at hand, once this link is not found some other things are tried. And I think was has changed in 10.5 is the message reported by the shell command used to check for kpsewhich in one of these steps. This command used to fail silently in 10.4, but not in 10.5. At least this is my conjecture. It is usually not an issue since for practically everyone the /usr/texbin part works already, and we don't even have to go into the heuristics. Most people who don't keep current with latex installs are probably also not keeping current with OS versions, so those that could have seen the problem if they moved to 10.5 are likely still in 10.4, and not seeing the problem (phew, that was a complicated one).
So anyway, that is probably a longer answer than what you bargained for, but there you have it.
Cheers,
Jan
Haris Skiadas Department of Mathematics and Computer Science Hanover College