[Fedora TeX Live] texlive + matlab - mex conflicts

[Tony Seward]

Big packages like MATLAB, especially ones that install their own libc or
Java, should really be in /opt.  See
http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#OPTADDONAPPLICATIONSOFTWAREPACKAGES

I place MATLAB in a subdirectory of /opt/MATLAB.  E.g. MATLAB 2010b is
in /opt/MATLAB/R2010b.  I also have COMSOL 4.1 in /opt/COMSOL/COMSOL41/.
I then put some symlinks in /opt/bin

        lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root  9 Jan 18 12:27 comsol -> comsol-41*
        lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 29 Jan 18 12:27 comsol-41 -> ../COMSOL/COMSOL41/bin/comsol*
        lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 13 Nov 14 16:21 matlab -> matlab-R2010b*
        lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 27 Nov 14 16:21 matlab-R2010b -> ../MATLAB/R2010b/bin/matlab*
        lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 10 Nov 14 16:21 mex -> mex-R2010b*
        lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 24 Nov 14 16:21 mex-R2010b -> ../MATLAB/R2010b/bin/mex*

In your case, Joshua, you should also probably put /opt/bin earlier in
the path so that MATLAB users get the mex from MATLAB.  I'm assuming
that you don't have a large need to typesetting Polish in Minnesota.

This is still only a stop-gap to fix the real problem.  Would it be
possible to rename the 'mex' in texlive-mex-bin to 'dvimex'?

Tony

On Thu, 2011-02-10 at 10:27 -0500, Trutwin, Joshua wrote:
> Both packages provide this program /usr/bin/mex
> 
> I'm not a frequent texlive user so I'm not sure how critical this program is to tex apps, but I know that our users would scream loudly if matlab didn't work so I typically install matlab over texlive-mex-bin with --force.  
> 
> I have control over the packaging of our matlab RPM though so I was thinking of relocating /usr/bin/mex from matlab to /usr/local/bin/mex.
> 
> Curious if anyone here has other suggestions.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Josh
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