George N. White III wrote:
In general, "root" should only be used when necessary. It is quite practical to administer TL without "root". Somewhere in the documentation it is mentioned that TL should not be installed by "root". TL binaries should not be run by "root".
I had ignored that advice to install TL as a non-root user thinking it would not be available system-wide if I did so. Force of habit was the other reason, because I had preciously installed the TL 2007 Debian packages using sudo. Thanks for your re-iteration.
I would appreciate advice on what would be the best option.Don't use "root" for TL. Not only does this avoid the complications of different paths for su and sudo, it limits the potential damage of some bug in the rather complex scripts needed to administer TL. It is very easy to change ownership of the TL directories to some ordinary user, so even if you installed using "root", you can change to the recommended configuration later.
I have done a recursive change of ownership of all files from the $TEXMFMAIN directory downwards so that they are now owned by a non-root user.
I can now use tlmgr as myself and in general everything works just as well, but with fewer workarounds and surprises, compared to running sudo.
Thank you. Chandra