[R-SIG-Mac] /usr/local/bin not writable

[Simon Urbanek]

Göran,

you can pretty much ignore that warning. It is failing at the end when it attempts to create convenience symlinks. Tinytex installs into ~/Library/TinyTeX so you just have to make sure it is on your PATH:

 export PATH=~/Library/TinyTeX/bin/universal-darwin/:$PATH

Unfortunately Yihui's instructions (to change /usrlocal/bin ownership to you) are somewhat dangerous and asocial, because they instruct you to symlink your local copy from your home to the system which is really bad idea if you are not the only user on the machine as it will prevent everyone else form using TeX. If you really want to do that (ie. there is no other user on the machine) then you can simply use

sudo tlmgr path add

instead or if you didn't set the PATH before with

sudo ~/Library/TinyTeX/bin/universal-darwin/tlmgr path add

Again, I wouldn't recommend that. A better way would be to pick a global location such as /Library/TinyTeX instead if you want to install it for all users and then run sudo /Library/TinyTeX/bin/universal-darwin/tlmgr.

Cheers,
Simon



> On Feb 16, 2022, at 11:03 AM, Göran Broström <goran.brostrom using umu.se> wrote:
> 
> Hello M1 experts,
> 
> I have just become a happy owner of a MacBook Pro M1 Max (very impressed so far). Installing Rgui was a piece of cake, and installing the packages I want also went smoothly. Until I tried 'tinytex'. Gave me the message in the Subject line, with a recommendation: "make it writable". I, however, vaguely remember a recommendation about not touching /usr/local/, so what do you recommend?
> 
> There is also the question of whether it might be better to install a full TeX distribution (texlive) on this machine (I mean for R purposes, of course). Any suggestions?
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Göran Broström
> 
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