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

[cfrees at imapmail.org]

On Mon 13th Oct, 2008 at 13:13, Manuel P?gouri?-Gonnard seems to have written:

> Ulrike Fischer a ?crit :
>> You are overcomplicating things. Miktex has such an on-the-fly
>> installation for years:
>
> I agree that we should avoid discussing problems for which MikTeX
> already has a solution, since we'd better just look at the solution.
>
> OTOH, MikteX and TeX Live are used in quite different contexts. The
> basic differences to me are:
> 1. TeX Live is often used on multi-user systems, or at least systems
> where the user is not constantly logged as administrator.

As long as it was an option at install time, wouldn't this problem be
avoidable? Admins installing in such situations (which would include
everyone on Mac OS X as things stand since the texlive tree is
currently owned by root) should simply choose to install TL fully and
to disable the auto-installation facility. So long as the installation
options are clear, those installing should be able to avoid the
potential problems.

> 2. TeX Live is used on a variety of system, and you cannot assume X11 or
> any other graphical thing is available on them.
>
> One could imagine workarounds to 1 in the following way:
> - if the user cannot have sufficient privileges to write in the TL
> trees, then just do nothing (tlmgr should never ever touch anything in
> TEXMFLOCAL or TEXMFHOME).
> - if the user can get sufficient privileges, then offer him the occasion
> to do so on the fly, as other applications do (but this is a problem
> since we cannot rely on uniform mechanisms such as sudo, etc) or...
> - just tell the user what to do ("please run tlmgr install oberdiek with
> sufficient privileges) but don't actually do anything.
>
> Now comes the second problem: how to communicate with the user (since
> obviously we should)? Here it is complicated too because if we
> communicate via command line we run into the problem that most user
> don't run TeX directly and read its output, but run it from an IDE,
> using --batchmode and filtering the output. If we try to pop up a dialog
> box like mikTeX does, we run into the problem that the we not
> necessarily have a graphical environment at hand (either running on a
> sever or compiling in a ssh session, or...)
>
> I think those are the interesting problems: in which way does TL differ
> from MikTeX and what does it imply concerning an possible auto-install
> feature?
>
> I honestly think (sorry to say that clearly) that comments like "I don't
> want it for myself" are completely irrelevant: it's clear that it will
> be an option.

So long as that means it's an option to install a full TL originally
and not merely that it is an option to en/disable automatic
installation of additional packages. I hadn't had the impression before
that that was the option people were thinking of.

- cfr

> Final remark: for such a feature to be useful, we don't necessarily need
> to get it work all the time in every context (I think it's impossible
> given the variety of uses of TL). We just need to get it work most of
> the time for the target audience of the feature (most probably
> single-machine users where the normal user has a way to get the
> privileges needed to run tlmgr install).
>
> I think if someone wants to propose a patch to kpse with this feature
> working at least in some cases, it would indeed be interested: those who
> don't want this feature just don't need to enable it.
>
> Manuel.
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