John McCabe-Dansted wrote: > On 4/4/07, Georg Baum > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> A LyX package management system will create far too much support and >> maintenance work, so we can't afford it. We have seen that the automatic >> miktex stuff does not work, since it interferes with firewalls, adds long > > MPM does not need to be run in automatic mode.
No, but the windows installer does this. >> Sure. But please don't forget that there are not enough developer >> resources available to implement everything that would be useful. > > I would like at least an agreement that if hypothetically someone did > write a "add missing TeX package" wizard,it wouldn't be rejected out > of hand. It seems like something I could do over a weekend. As long as this interfaces to some external package manger, and the code in LyX is restricted to simple interface glue, then I think it would be a good addition. For example, configure.py could check for known package managers, and a button or menu option could be added to start it where it makes sense, e.g. in the error message dialog about a missing LaTeX package, or the TeX information dialog. A wizard would be too much IMHO. We should really keep the UNIX philosophy: Do only one thing, but do that perfect, and make it easy to interface to other programs for the things we can't do. > Even with TeXLive MPM is useful, Apt is of no use for managing > ~/.texmf. Attempting to extend apt (and yum and ...) to include the > features of mpm really would be a waste of resources. The point is that most people don't need ~/.texmf if they use a good and current TeX distribution. What I have in ~/.texmf is almost only stuff that is not on CTAN, and I doubt that mpm would help there. Georg
