Texlive contains booktabs-de or not?

Question

I'm using Ubuntu vivid and have installed the textlive-full package. If I use the package booktabs-de my tex file cannot be complied because the package cannot be found. According to https://packages.debian.org/sid/texlive-lang-german texlive-lang-german (and therefore texlive-full) should contain the tex package booktabs-de right?

Answer 1

One should distinguish between “LaTeX packages” and ”TeX Live packages”.

A “LaTeX package” is a file that can be loaded from a document with \usepackage, whereas a “TeX Live package” is a collection of files not necessarily containing a LaTeX package.

In the case of booktabs-de one can look at the output of

tlmgr info booktabs-de --list

which is

package:     booktabs-de
category:    Package
shortdesc:   German version of booktabs.
longdesc:    This is a "translation" of the booktabs.
installed:   Yes
revision:    21907
sizes:       doc: 329k
relocatable: Yes
cat-version: 1.61803
cat-date:    2014-02-26 23:03:13 +0100
cat-license: gpl
collection:  collection-langgerman
Included files, by type:
doc files:
  texmf-dist/doc/latex/booktabs-de/README-DE details="Readme (German)" language="de"
  texmf-dist/doc/latex/booktabs-de/booktabs-de.dtx
  texmf-dist/doc/latex/booktabs-de/booktabs-de.ins
  texmf-dist/doc/latex/booktabs-de/booktabs-de.pdf details="Package documentation"

When TeX Live/Debian is concerned, one just doesn't manage the distribution with tlmgr, but the concept is the same, as the Debian packages are essentially collections of TeX Live packages.

The booktabs-de TeX Live package contains the documentation in German for the booktabs LaTeX package.

So you have still to do

\usepackage{booktabs}

in your document, whereas the shell command

texdoc booktabs-de

will show the documentation in German.

The booktabs LaTeX package is provided by the booktabs TeX Live package, which resides in collection-latexrecommended; the corresponding Debian package for apt-get is texlive-latex-recommended