I use LaTeX and I work frequently offline. I would like to install all TeXLive docs, so that the texdoc command line utility always finds what I need.
Is there a meta-package that does this? Or at least a small number of packages that would cover it?
(On Fedora 42.)
Nearly all texlive docs follow the CTAN policy of documents using <package-name>.doc. Fedora packages use -doc, so <package-name>-doc. Before retiring I would install the full TeXLive from CTAN at work so I had complete documentation and could check problematic .tex files against current texlive (few distros provid a current texlive and journals often provided LaTeX templates that used obsolete packages).
Now I install just what I need with Fedora packages and still have a full CTAN installation, and use “Environment Modules” (lua version from the Lmod package) to be able to quickly switch between the CTAN and Fedora TeX systems.
sudo dnf list texlive\*doc
should list all the doc packages. You should be able to install them with:
sudo dnf install texlive\*doc
...
Total size of inbound packages is 1 GiB. Need to download 1 GiB.
After this operation, 2 GiB extra will be used (install 2 GiB, remove 0 B).
Is this ok [y/N]:
(It’s a lot less than I had expected)
Similar to @gnwiii I personally install TeXLive from CTAN (TeX Live - TeX Users Group) rather than the Fedora RPMs. I use LaTeX across both Linux and macOS platforms - I find that I can I can both get the complete latest distribution and keep it up to date with the same bits on both platforms.
The entire TeXLive package isn’t that big. 9GB or so.
How do you keep it updated? (Is updating equivalent to removing and installing it again?)
I have some pieces of software that I manage outside dnf & flatpak (eg Julia, Emacs packages), but I prefer to keep those to a minimum.
CTAN TeXLive installs under one top-level directory. The tlmgr command-line tool (disabled in Fedora’s package) is used to check the configured mirror site (many large organizations maintain an internal mirror) for updated packages, download and install them.
It is quite common to have multi-author documents with authors at different institutions using different OS’s. A current CTAN TeXLive is the easiest way to for an author whose local version is too old to stay compatible with the other authors, but distro TeXLive packages are often needed when building packages. Environment Modules make it easy to switch back and forth between distro and current TeXLive installations.
We’re lucky enough to have an institutional membership to Overleaf, which really helps. It allows one to use multiple TeXLive versions, and does generally have the latest one too. It also syncs with Git/GitHub so I work locally while others that prefer the web interface work over the website and so on.