[tex-live] How about auto-download of classes/styles etc. ?

[Philip TAYLOR]

I am not convinced that a completely automatic
system (even with an opt-out clause) is necessarily
the best approach.  I wonder whether a semi-manual
system, requiring the insertion of code similar to
(at most one of) the following :

	\requires scheme:gutenberg
	\requires package:12many
	\requires collection:basic
	\requires class:book

and so on.  On finding that the local TeX Live installation
did not include a required module, an enhanced TeX engine
would liaise with the TLMGR to initiate its download.

The advantage of this approach is that there is no possibility
that the missing file was actually intended to be sourced
locally, since the use of \requires would be an explicit
declaration that the specified resource is a CTAN resource
rather than a local one.  With the MikTeX approach (and I am
not a MikTeX user, so I may be mistaken here), I believe it
is possible for MikTeX to inadvertently fetch a CTAN resource
when the missing resource was a (non-existent) locally-written
file of the same name as the CTAN resource.

Philip Taylor