[OS X TeX] TDSXplorer

[Dr. Clea F. Rees]

On 06/09/08, you seem to have written:

> On Sat, Sep 6, 2008 at 6:37 PM, Dr. Clea F. Rees <cfrees at imapmail.org> wrote:
>> On 06/09/08, you seem to have written:
>>
>>> 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
>>
>> Surely it can do this, can't it? If the package is installed, an "i"
>> appears before the item. If not, there is no "i". Maybe I'm not
>> understanding you correctly, though.
>
> As I wrote there is a way to do it
>
> %tlmgr list | egrep -v "^i|binary|00|win32|wintools|darwin|scheme-"
>
> (to avoid a too big output to handle)

Sorry. I misread you completely. You meant that you cannot list *just*
those packages..., correct? For some reason, I thought you meant that
you could not list them at all. I don't know why the next bit didn't
make me revise this interpretation.


>>> 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)
>>
>> It isn't just that it doesn't know about the local/home texmf trees. It
>> does not actually look at the main TL tree either. What I mean is that
>> it isn't as though it could "also look" at packages in the additional
>> trees. That isn't how it works. It relies on a database (if that's the
>> right term) which describes the contents of the TL tree.
>>
>> This also means it relies on the accuracy of that database. If, for
>> example, the database says that fontinst is at version 1.928 when the
>> installed version is actually 1.927, tlmgr will never recognise the
>> existence of the newer version. (Unless a later version of fontinst is
>> released, of course.)
>>
>> At least, I've been trying to make sense of it and I think this is how
>> it works. It seems to use /usr/local/texlive/2008/tlpkg/tlpobj/*.tlpobj
>> and /usr/local/texlive/2008/tlpkg/texlive.tlpdb as sources of
>> information about the current state of the tree.
>>
>> I've started going through the documentation but a lot of it seems to be
>> out-of-date (or maybe inapplicable to the MacTeX version?).
>
> There is no difference between mactex and the generic version

Good to know.

>> I'm not quite clear yet about the relationship between packages on CTAN
>> and packages in the (remote) TL tree, so to speak. If these are
>> distinct, presumably the only solution would involve changing the remote TL
>> package as well as correcting the information in the local
>> database...?
>
> TL team goes through CTAN packages and repackages them for TLMGR.
> So basically the difference should be few days but sometimes things
> fall between cracks.
> F.e. attachfile which is much newer on CTAN than in TLMGR. Sometimes
> they move things
> (like they did with beamer). One of the problem is that some package
> authors have very original idea how submissions should look like

So presumably that means that the repackaged version of fontinst is
incorrect and the only way to get the version TL claims to use is to
download it separately and install in texmf-local, say.

So suppose somebody comes along and redoes the package of fontinst so
that the package really does contain version 1.928. Is there any way
for tlmgr to recognise this given that it currently thinks that version
is already installed (even though it's not)?

Thanks,
cfr