Re: problem with siunitx and expl3.sty with MikTeX 2.9 last update

Am Wed, 20 Jul 2011 14:11:59 +0200 schrieb Pierre Bach:

> Hi,

> I am a teacher who pushes his young students to use LaTeX with MikTeX and
> the nice siunitx package. After last update, one sent me messages to call
> for help about expl3.sty missing. I had first no problem to compile his file
> on my computer, so I made an update (last was about one month away) of my
> MiKTeX 2.9 and I had the same problem.

> I found the solution, which is to use the packages manager to install the
> two packages required from siunitx since it is written on ctan: The package
> relies on LaTeX 3 support from the
> <http://ctan.mackichan.com/help/Catalogue/entries/l3kernel.html> l3kernel
> and  <http://ctan.mackichan.com/help/Catalogue/entries/l3packages.html>
> l3packages bundles.


> But this is hard to find for my students since I give them a full sample
> file adapted to their research with a lot of packages so it is easy for them
> to have a nice document without learning all LaTeX and MikTeX complexity.
> However, it is not easy if they have strange message when compiling. In
> fact, the problem is that many students are too shy to send me an e-mail and
> lost a lot of time to find the solution by themselves and I am afraid that
> they will start to find LaTeX repulsive if this happen too often.


Well if I were your student and would read in which tone you write
about me - as if I were a three old which would burst into tears
only because of an error and to afraid to ask back -- I would be
rather affronted.

Apart from this: You are pushing your student towards miktex so you
are hoping that sometimes in the future they will write their own
documents. And then they will get errors. So instead of shielding
them now from errors show them how to solve them. There are lot of
helpful people around which can help (e.g. on c.t.t. or
tex.stackexchange or in this mailing list.)


> Until this last update, I had no problem with siunitx, so something has
> changed about the way l3kernel and l3packages are managed by default (no
> more installed, just downloaded?) and the compiler looks to be unable to
> know that the expl3.sty is in fact in l3kernel and just stop. Would it be
> possible to correct the setting for these two packages or find a way to tell
> the flying package installer where he will find a file that is included in
> another package?

Miktex uses a local database to find missing packages.

When packages are rearranged (which doesn't happen often) then this
local database is no longer in sync with the remote repository. So
you must synchronize it (in the package manager, at best in user +
admin mode if you have a multi user installation). 



-- 
Ulrike Fischer 


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