tlmgr problems under downstream package environment

Question

I am looking for more detailed information on tlmgr. The information I have is from tlmgr --help and it does not help to solve problems I have.

Background

I have used Robby Workman's texlive.Slackbuild to build a texlive package in order to install texlive on my slackware machines in stead of the tetex installation that Slackware comes with up to version 13.37. (I used a more recent release of texlive than the one the script were originally written for, but that should not make a difference. The difference is a few weeks in the 2011 release.) In the end I want to rsync with one repository and store it on my server for use with texlive on my Windows and Linux installations.

I also picked up that the philosophy of many of the downstream package makers is not to provide support for things like tlmgr as it does not uphold the distro package management approach. Well it may work for many, but that is too limiting to me. (It's the same approach some people follow towards cpan – if its not pre-packaged for the distro it is not installed; I use Slackware as a basis and expand each box according to what is needed from it.)

The first problem I had after installation of the build texlive package was the missing tlmgr associated files. I downloaded all of them.

Next I assumed that I had to download texlive.tlpdb, but that referred to all potential things that could be installed with texlive. So it was not the solution. If I try to do tlmgr check file to do a clean up, it points to /usr/share/bin which does not exist, it probably should refer to /usr/share/texmf/bin. (Which seems to be a path problem as the variable $Master in tlmgr.pl refers to that location.)

The next thing I tried was to recreate. I deleted texlive.tlpdb and ran: tlmgr recreate-tlpdb. The first complaint is that more than one platform is possible and one must specify it with --platform=, so I added --platform=i386-linux as inside the texlive.tlpdb and for which the texlive installation was built. Then the complaint is the platform is not present in /usr/share/bin. I even added a symlink inside /usr/share/texmf/bin/ i386-linux to /usr/share/texmf/bin, but that also does not solve the problem.

My question

I would like to know how to get tlmgr working so I can update tex-packages as and when I decide to, without waiting for a next release. A full release is also to big (about 1.5GB) to download one every now and then. [My current ISP contract clamps me severely down if I become a prime down-loader and then I might as well use an old 1200Bd dail-up modem.]

Possible alternative solutions

I thought of writing a perl program that extracts from the texlive.tlpdb the bits that are appropriate to the installation, but then there are lot of other problems that still need to be overcome, the first two being:

1. Package revision numbers which cannot be correlated with the the installation.
2. Determining which collections and schemes are fully installed.

Another possibility is to rebuild the texlive package and build it for multi-platform, but that would still not solve tlmgr's vantage point from /usr/share/bin.

A last and totally different approach would be to use a different package maker that operates using tl-install and then create a package against a local copy of a texlive repository that I have made more two months ago. After that I could maybe use tlmgr as its supposed to be, I will start searching again for examples of this approach.

Answer 1

Sorry about your problems with tlmgr. First, I'll point you to the README.tlpkg that gets installed with the package docs.

Of course, you've already figured out that tlpkg is broken, so that in itself doesn't really help you. To make a long story short, I have no interest in making tlpkg work and thus have not (and do not plan to) investigate(d) it at all. In other words, you're on your own here.

Answer 2

Simple answer: Don't use Slack TeX Live, but proper upstream TL. Or stick to what is in slack. There is no other way, sorry.