[tex-live] What is it?

[Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard]

Victor Ivrii a écrit :
> There is a more challenging trick for tlmgr to do: to look to
> texmf-local and private user trees
> and advise (at this moment I do not see about actions)
> [...]
> Well, since packages in texmf-local and user tree are not installed by
> tlmgr, tlmgr could say "seems to be".
> 
Well, if you want tlmgr to be able to do this at least half reliably,
I'm afraid you need quite a lot of skills in AI. The reason why we use
our internal svn rev number as a criterion to determine age is that it's
really hard if not impossible to determine any other "more relevant"
version number (such as the author's "version string" or even last
update date).

Even in the LaTeX world where it is quite usual to provide the version
string and date as second argument to \ProvidesPackage, it's not easy to
determine them (think \def\fileversion{3.0a}, think svn/cvs/whatever id,
think multiple files..;) and there's the rest of the wild world...

So I'm afraid the answer is no, we won't try to do it, and the rule is
clear: if you install something locally, you're on your own and you're
responsible of keeping track of the distribution changes to make sure
whether you want to keep your local version, switch back to the dist
version, merge changes, etc.

Manuel.