How to discover what TeXLive ports I need

[Dan Ports]

On Thu, May 19, 2016 at 02:11:44PM +0200, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> *Personally* I would find it most useful if I could search for, say,
> "prettyref.sty" with a command like
>     port searchfile "prettyref.sty"

I'd find that to be a pretty useful feature in general (like apt-file).
One could imagine that since we're building packages now we could build
an index of which files are in all of the packages...

> 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:

I've thought about doing that but some of the lists are pretty long --
texlive-latex-extra has over a thousand packages and there are another
few that are over a hundred. It might be worth doing anyway since you
could search it with `port search --long_description`

(Looking that up just now, I was surprised to find that `port search`
doesn't search long_description by default)

> 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.

We could easily ship the tlpdb file but it would be a lot more useful
with a utility to search it.

Dan

-- 
Dan R. K. Ports                UW CSE                http://drkp.net/