[tex-live] Extended TeX : Integration with the TeX Live Package Manager ?

[George N. White III]

On Wed, Aug 6, 2008 at 2:12 PM, Philip TAYLOR
<Philip-and-LeKhanh at royal-tunbridge-wells.org> wrote:

> Noting how slow a network install of Scheme:full is
> (I'm up to "functan", after one failure and several
> elapsed hours), I wonder whether any thought has
> been given (or is being given) to the idea of
> integrating an extended TeX with the TeX Live Package
> Manager ?  The idea I have in mind would require
> the addition of one primitive, called (say) \Requires,
> which would take as parameter the name of a TeX Live
> collection.  The extended TeX would then liaise with
> the Package Manager to see whether the required package
> wa already installed, and if not, would ask the PM to
> commence the download.  The idea can obviously be
> extended to allow not only collections, but other
> levels of granularity (such as languages) which the
> PM supports, perhaps right down to the level of
> individual files.  Is this work-in-progress, does
> anyone know ?

MikTeX has it, but without reliable connections to a
CTAN server, isn't going to be much help.  If your
access is like mine, it works better in the early AM,
but then you want a program to do the transfers
automatically.

I don't think network installs are suitable for everyone.
They make sense if you have a nearby reliable server,
as in a campus network with a local CTAN mirror, but
are problematic not only for texlive, but also for linux
package managers, if your network access is not
robust.

I too found network installs of TL very painful.  I gave that up
in favor of installing (using --location) from a local svn Master
directory.  I use rsync to maintain local repositories for TeX Live
and also MikTeX.  These get updated each night.   I'm
using linux, but the same can be done on Windows.

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia