How to discover what TeXLive ports I need

[Mojca Miklavec]

On 19 May 2016 at 14:02, Rainer Müller wrote:
> On 2016-05-19 12:06, list_email at icloud.com wrote:
>> That's it. Is there some way to figure out what ports I need to add
>> to get specific functionality? Or will I have to bite the bullet and
>> do sudo port install texlive +full which warns "Full installation
>> scheme (very large!)".
>
> There is an index listing which LaTeX packages are in which MacPorts ports:
>
> https://trac.macports.org/wiki/TeXLivePackages
>
> Where should we add this to make it easier to find? Port descriptions?

*Personally* I would find it most useful if I could search for, say,
"prettyref.sty" with a command like
    port searchfile "prettyref.sty"

But on the other hand it probably wouldn't be a bad idea if all the
texlive packages would actually list the list of packages they
contain. For example:

> port info texlive-basic
texlive-basic @37485 (tex)
Variants:             [+]doc, src

Description:          These files are regarded as basic for any TeX
system, covering plain TeX macros, Computer Modern fonts, and
configuration for common drivers; no LaTeX. Contains packages:
amsfonts, bibtex, cm, dvipdfmx, dvipdfmx-def, dvips, ..., xdvi


This would still be only semi-useful because many times it's not
exactly clear to which package a missing file belongs until one checks
texlive.tlpdb.

Maybe texlive could also ship texlive.tlpdb (or perhaps some subset of
it to make searching for files easier). In the extreme case it should
actually be possible to trigger installation of the required package
when a known file is missing (this is what MikTeX does for example),
but it would require some extra coding.

Mojca