[OS X TeX] TDSXplorer

[Victor Ivrii]

On Sat, Sep 6, 2008 at 6:37 PM, Dr. Clea F. Rees <cfrees at imapmail.org> wrote:
> On 06/09/08, you seem to have written:
>
>> Well, this beast does not exist
>>
>>
>> The shortcomings of tlmgr are
>>
>> 1) Cannot list packages which are not in your tlmgr installation  but
>> remotely available with tlmgr
>
> Surely it can do this, can't it? If the package is installed, an "i"
> appears before the item. If not, there is no "i". Maybe I'm not
> understanding you correctly, though.

As I wrote there is a way to do it

%tlmgr list | egrep -v "^i|binary|00|win32|wintools|darwin|scheme-"

(to avoid a too big output to handle)

>
>> 2) Currently tlmg knows nothing about (texmf-local or ~/Library/texmf
>> ). If you have obsolete version of package sitting there, no matter
>> how tlmgr updates /usr/local/texlive/2008/texmf-dist/ it will have no
>> effect until you manually remove the package. Those who used mpm
>> should take care of this tree as well (probably the best thing would
>> be to remove it completely and remove mpm itself)
>
> It isn't just that it doesn't know about the local/home texmf trees. It
> does not actually look at the main TL tree either. What I mean is that
> it isn't as though it could "also look" at packages in the additional
> trees. That isn't how it works. It relies on a database (if that's the
> right term) which describes the contents of the TL tree.
>
> This also means it relies on the accuracy of that database. If, for
> example, the database says that fontinst is at version 1.928 when the
> installed version is actually 1.927, tlmgr will never recognise the
> existence of the newer version. (Unless a later version of fontinst is
> released, of course.)
>
> At least, I've been trying to make sense of it and I think this is how
> it works. It seems to use /usr/local/texlive/2008/tlpkg/tlpobj/*.tlpobj
> and /usr/local/texlive/2008/tlpkg/texlive.tlpdb as sources of
> information about the current state of the tree.
>
> I've started going through the documentation but a lot of it seems to be
> out-of-date (or maybe inapplicable to the MacTeX version?).

There is no difference between mactex and the generic version


> I'm not quite clear yet about the relationship between packages on CTAN
> and packages in the (remote) TL tree, so to speak. If these are
> distinct, presumably the only solution would involve changing the remote TL
> package as well as correcting the information in the local
> database...?

TL team goes through CTAN packages and repackages them for TLMGR.
So basically the difference should be few days but sometimes things
fall between cracks.
F.e. attachfile which is much newer on CTAN than in TLMGR. Sometimes
they move things
(like they did with beamer). One of the problem is that some package
authors have very original idea how submissions should look like

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