TeXlive: tlmgr not work

[natrix]

Hello Forum!

I need to use texlive manager (tlmgr), but does not work:

[bec]

Hello natrix,

tlmgr is not supported in Gentoo. You can install texlive packages through ebuilds.

What do you want to do?
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abe

[natrix]

So, the USE app-text/texlive-core tk is useless??

I want to install some packages that are out of portage: jasthesis, laar, etc

[bec]

I don't know about the useflag tk, but I installed clrscode3e.sty from the book "Introduction to algorithms":
- putting it manually somewhere in /usr/local/share/texmf/
- I choose /usr/local/share/texmf/tex/latex/misc
- running texconfig
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abe

[natrix]

In theory; the USE "tk" install perl-tk and the GUI for texlive manager.

Thanks for your help!!

[mv]

Maybe tlmgr was removed intentionally.

In fact, it is not a good idea to use tlmgr at all.

For simple things, like a few .sty or .cls files, you can as well copy them to your local texmf directories.
For complex things, better wait until they are properly packaged for gentoo.
A nice example is biber: This needed about a year to be packaged, but if you would use the TeXLive version you would get old perl libraries with possible security issues instead of using the current ones provided by gentoo.

Also, you would have difficulties to uninstall/upgrade things (except what tlmgr does for you) because portage is not aware of these installations: Mixtures of package managers are never a good idea to have.

I am aware that the hint "wait for proper packaging" does not help you much if you urgently need some package.

IIRC, there was some package which could semi-automatically generate ebuilds for TeXlive packes, but I forgot its name and where it can be found. Maybe this can be used for your purpose. It is definitely a better idea to use this instead of tlmgr, although, of course, it might be more complicated to use and very likely does not work out-of-the-box for complex texlive pacakges.

[natrix]

Hello mv!

Thanks for your answer.

I think that the iirc is g-ctan, but this is outdated and a strong mask.

[thekraken]

This really is difficult for me to accept. In my current situation, I need to use biber, biblatex, and biblatex-apa in order to get my article properly formatted. in a normal TeX situation, I could just download the relevant packages from CTAN and install them in my TL, but there are serious version incompatibilities because of the speed at which TL is updated that make it impossible for those three packages to work together *in their current, portage supported versions*. That is, I need biblatex 3.7, biblatex-apa 7.4, and biber 2.7. biblatex i can get, but biblatex-apa is stuck in 6.6, and biber is stuck in 2.7 on portage.

The fact that there are certain compatibility issues with different versions of fast-moving packages that portage simply can't keep up with seems like a really good reason to make for a TeX-specific workaround, like tlmgr. I understand the benefits of portage---i prefer it and have preferred it for quite some time, but i really can't imagine a good reason for abandoning an option such as g-ctan or setting up tlmgr on portage for fixing a situation like my own.
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#926329 +(3230)- [X]

<N00b>Can someone explain cell division?
<Nerd> o
<Nerd> 0
<Nerd> 8
<Nerd> oo

[mv]

[thekraken]

thanks for the response. I've managed to install biber as a binary on its own so that's not the huge issue anymore.

it's just a matter of version-matching at this point and doing some manual installations. the folks over at stackexchange are helping me to match the versions. i don't exactly need the newest of everything---i just want the versions to match so it works.

i didn't know about biblatex-apa being part of bibtexextra-2016, but that did solve the mystery of why \listfile shows that version of biblatex-apa!

still errors. more fiddling.
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#926329 +(3230)- [X]

<N00b>Can someone explain cell division?
<Nerd> o
<Nerd> 0
<Nerd> 8
<Nerd> oo