Re: on the fly installation for TL

Hi Karl, Frank,

On Tue, 2026-01-20 at 15:45 -0700, Karl Berry wrote:
> Regarding on the fly pkg installation for TL, I've created an item at
>   https://puszcza.gnu.org.ua/bugs/index.php?668
> with the various preliminary notes Norbert and I have discussed.

I've implemented a basic LuaTeX-only solution here:

    https://github.com/gucci-on-fleek/texlive-auto-package-install

It's mostly untested and undocumented, but it seems to work fairly well
in my testing. After installing only scheme-basic, the following file
compiles without any errors:

    \RequirePackage{auto-package-install}
    \documentclass{article}

    \usepackage{amsmath}

    \usepackage{lua-widow-control}

    \usepackage{fontspec}
    \setmainfont{NewCM10-Regular.otf}

    \begin{document}
        Hello, world!
    \end{document}

On Wed, 2026-01-21 at 10:57 +0100, Frank Mittelbach wrote:
> What I'm more concerned with is the fact that just adding a package
> because it is missing often ends up with broken dependencies. I
> understand that is often happening with MikTeX as you get the new
> package in current version but related package stay on whatever version
> they have been first loaded and then break because they do not match
> what the other package expect.

My package automatically updates any files that aren't at the most
recent version, so this hopefully shouldn't be an issue. (But the
initial implementation only tries to update files that the package has
previously downloaded itself, so files installed via tlmgr might be
out-of-date. This should be relatively easy to change if needed though).

Thanks,
-- Max