[OS X TeX] TDSXplorer

[Victor Ivrii]

Well, this beast does not exist


The shortcomings of tlmgr are

1) Cannot list packages which are not in your tlmgr installation  but
remotely available with tlmgr

This is easy, to list them but (but avoid platform-specific and some
other files which are not really packages or documentclasses) type
%tlmgr list | egrep -v "^i|binary|00|win32|wintools|darwin|scheme-"

2) Currently tlmg knows nothing about (texmf-local or ~/Library/texmf
). If you have obsolete version of package sitting there, no matter
how tlmgr updates /usr/local/texlive/2008/texmf-dist/ it will have no
effect until you manually remove the package. Those who used mpm
should take care of this tree as well (probably the best thing would
be to remove it completely and remove mpm itself)

TDSXplorer should be able to tell the user

"You seem to have the package with the same name in texmf-local or
usertree and you have (don't have) it in the texmf-dist.Would you like
(to install such package into  texmf-dist  and) then compare files?"

It would be nice to have main sty or cls files open for inspection too.

This is scaled down idea. Ideally it would be nice if it could compare
versions of the packages/documentclasses in different trees and may be
even remove obsolete package from texmf-local  or ~/Library/texmf.

TeXLive team seem to like 1) but not 2) because (I can understand
them) dealing with the package installed by the user who can have his
own ideas how it should be installed is rather challenging. Leave
alone that the should constantly repackage submitted packages to make
them available via tlmgr

Victor


-- 
========================
Victor Ivrii, Professor, Department of Mathematics, University of Toronto
http://www.math.toronto.edu/ivrii