[OS X TeX] Installing packages

[Joseph C. Slater]

On Jun 3, 2004, at 6:53 PM, Gerben Wierda wrote:

> I wonder how MikTeX does this. After all, TeX/CTAN/LaTeX packages are 
> far from standardised in how they should be processed for install.
>
> If there is some system to it, I could implement this.
>
> G
>

Wow! Here's a message posted to this list from 3 years ago (remember 
this Gerben?). Anyway, the way to do this may be to port MPM (The 
MikTeX package manager) in some form.


> 	• 	From: "Troy Goodson" <Troy.D.Goodson at jpl.nasa.gov>
> 	• 	Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2001 08:23:41 -0800
> At 3:56 PM +0100 11/16/01, Gerben Wierda wrote:
> >Sadly, the docstrip stuff is not standardized and often you need to
> >follow specific instructions in a readme to be able to compile tex
> >packages from docstrip sources and install. There are also no
> >standardized places, nor standardized items to do. There are only a
> >few who at least upgrade properly by locating existig instances
> >first.
> >
> >That is the reason why I do these things by hand, and then add them
> >to my distribution, to spare other people the setup.
>
> I didn't know the situation was quite this bad.  OK, How about a
> LaTeX package manager a la fink?  Essentially, this is a set of
> package-by-package rules for installing packages.  Basically, we
> novice users depend on and trust the power users to write the rules.
> The payoff is that novice users don't have to become power users to
> simply install a package.  Of course, there will be some 'rare'
> packages that it doesn't know about and it the rules it has will
> always lag new releases of packages, but that's still better than me
> having to figure out the arcane rules of package management.
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------

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