Solved (?) Latex packages not installed in standard texlive instalation

[germanzorba]

Hi,

I have the following problem:

I need to compile a latex file that uses the tikz-cd latex package.
I was working on a fresh install of PCLinuxOS 2013 KDE, actualized with Synaptic. I installed Kile and all it's dependencies (again using Synaptic, the dependencies added the texlive and texlive-texmf packages, but not the other texlive-* packages).
With this configuration, the tikz-cd package wasn't present in the /usr/share/texmf-dist directory (and so, my file didn't compile)
I tried marking every texlive-* package in synaptic, but a bunch of warnings told me not to do so.

Finally, as a last resource, I made a full installation of texlive, and overrode  the synaptic instalation by appending texlive's bin directory at beginning of $PATH. I know it's a brute force solution. A 3.6GB subtree at /usr/local/texlive/2012/texmf-dist is a signal of how brute my solution is. But it works by the moment.

So, my question is, is there a better solution? Some things i will consider better solutions are:
- a package already in the repos providing tickz-cd.sty (I know I may miss such a package, but I swear I looked for it)
- a program which can download from CTAN repos into the texmf-dist directory (and check for dependencies and such).

Greetings,

Germán

[footstep11]

Hi Germán,

   I too notice that the texlive distribution present in PCLinuxOS is not (and I think will never be) updated. The reason is that LaTeX packages change every day, so we should need a person packaging the styles continuosly 
  I therefore installed (like you) the texlive tree in /opt and, following the installation instructions, I am using it without any problem.  To update the styles I then use the tlmgr program (there is also a graphical frontend by using the -gui switch) so all the packages are always updated.

Ciao, Mauro

[germanzorba]

Thanks, I'll try that tlmgr.

I hope that overriding the latex program (and pdflatex, and dvips, and ps2pdf, and so) will never conflict with other software, because apt-get can not take control of that (at least, not in the way I've done the instalation). :/

Not sure if this is solved, but I guess I should mark it as so.