Hi
In my opinion, this is the way of the future. It is ludicrous that we all have to create our own virtual CTAN mirrors. Far better to evolve a methodology that will, entirely transparently, use a local copy as first choice; fetch (via http) a remote copy and make it local, as second choice; and (3) offer a configuration option to check whether the remote copy is more recent than the local and if so, fetch it (and install it locally) automatically when that file is next required.
I thought, MikTeX offers that: whenever a package is loaded, that is not already installed, it is downloaded on the fly and then loaded. I'm not sure about the version check, but it's not always advisable to use the latest version of a package.
bye Toscho -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
