[tex-live] What is it?

[Victor Ivrii]

On Sat, Sep 6, 2008 at 8:03 AM, Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard <mpg at elzevir.fr> wrote:
> 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...

I was thinking about this

>
> 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.
>

Well, may be at least to tell 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.

Note this is scaled-down suggestion. Actually it could be even not
tlmgr but a completely different program (using tlmgr just to check
that the package is available remotely)

> Manuel.
>
>


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