[tex-live] How about auto-download of classes/styles etc. ?

[Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard]

Ulrike Fischer a écrit :
> You are overcomplicating things. Miktex has such an on-the-fly
> installation for years:

I agree that we should avoid discussing problems for which MikTeX
already has a solution, since we'd better just look at the solution.

OTOH, MikteX and TeX Live are used in quite different contexts. The
basic differences to me are:
1. TeX Live is often used on multi-user systems, or at least systems
where the user is not constantly logged as administrator.
2. TeX Live is used on a variety of system, and you cannot assume X11 or
any other graphical thing is available on them.

One could imagine workarounds to 1 in the following way:
- if the user cannot have sufficient privileges to write in the TL
trees, then just do nothing (tlmgr should never ever touch anything in
TEXMFLOCAL or TEXMFHOME).
- if the user can get sufficient privileges, then offer him the occasion
to do so on the fly, as other applications do (but this is a problem
since we cannot rely on uniform mechanisms such as sudo, etc) or...
- just tell the user what to do ("please run tlmgr install oberdiek with
sufficient privileges) but don't actually do anything.

Now comes the second problem: how to communicate with the user (since
obviously we should)? Here it is complicated too because if we
communicate via command line we run into the problem that most user
don't run TeX directly and read its output, but run it from an IDE,
using --batchmode and filtering the output. If we try to pop up a dialog
box like mikTeX does, we run into the problem that the we not
necessarily have a graphical environment at hand (either running on a
sever or compiling in a ssh session, or...)

I think those are the interesting problems: in which way does TL differ
from MikTeX and what does it imply concerning an possible auto-install
feature?

I honestly think (sorry to say that clearly) that comments like "I don't
want it for myself" are completely irrelevant: it's clear that it will
be an option.

Final remark: for such a feature to be useful, we don't necessarily need
to get it work all the time in every context (I think it's impossible
given the variety of uses of TL). We just need to get it work most of
the time for the target audience of the feature (most probably
single-machine users where the normal user has a way to get the
privileges needed to run tlmgr install).

I think if someone wants to propose a patch to kpse with this feature
working at least in some cases, it would indeed be interested: those who
don't want this feature just don't need to enable it.

Manuel.