CTAN install: yes or no? [was Re: Installing Latex in XP]

[Robin Fairbairns]

> >From Christina Thiele <cthiele at ccs.carleton.ca> on 24 Oct 2003:
> >    Would you prefer to have CTAN materials just left on the CD (and of
> >    a fairly recent vintage) or do you like that it's part of the
> >    installation?
>
> I would prefer something like the MikTeX package manager, which
> allows the user to install selected packages from the internet and
> to keep them up to date.

this is the ideal, i agree.  as a ctan manager, i've long dreamed of
such a mechanism, but i'm afraid i've still not got anywhere practical
with it.  ("long", in this case, is more than 5 years...)

once the basic mechanism is established, by ctan (possibly leaning on
the work of the texlive people), we can hope for a version built-in to
y&y distributions.  it's simply too big a job for any one distributor
to do.

what christian schenk _does_ manage is not quite the thing i'm
imagining: he simply builds source packages and makes .cab files for
installation in miktex.  what i want is a set of metadata for every
package, that a standard application can use, for any tex
distribution.

robin