Phil,
MiKTeX, available for Windows users, does exactly what you describe (if you
give it permission to download missing packages automatically; you can turn
that off if desired). That's the main reason I use it in preference to
TeXLive. I realize it's not helpful for non-Windows folks, but it shows
that your idea is not " pie in the sky."
David
----- Original Message -----
From: "Philip TAYLOR (Webmaster, Ret'd)" <p.tay...@rhul.ac.uk>
To: "Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms" <xetex@tug.org>
Sent: Wednesday, June 22, 2011 5:42 AM
Subject: Re: [XeTeX] Loading fonts from a common server or http URL
Keith J. Schultz wrote:
Well, in a sense with tlmgr we already have this. Only,
it is manual. Could write a cron script to run tlmgr to keep
the system uptodate.
Yes, but that is TLMGR, and I am speaking of TeX ! In other
words, if I write \usepackage {keyval}, I would like /TeX/
to (a) look to see if I have keyval.cls locally; (b) if not,
look to see in which package/bundle/whatever "keyval" lives;
(c) fetch the p/b/w-h-y from CTAN; (d) un-p/b/w it into my
local TeXMF hierarchy; (e) continue as if nothing had happened
and the file had been local all the while. It may sound
"pie in the sky", but isn't this exactly what a sane, reasonable,
TeX user would want to happen in the 21st century ?
** Phil.
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