TeX Live and MacTeX ⇒ update texlive packages offline?

[yonggang]

Can tlmgr update texlive packages offline? I have downloaded all the files in the tlnet fold from the website to my local disk, including fold ARCHIVE and TLPKG, and the repository option is set to the local fold like 'file:/home/tlnet'. If I install a new package, it always tell me that: ' Cannot find a package xxxx(.zip or .xz) in file:/home/tlnet/archive', although the file does exist indeed.
And the update does no effect, either.

My system is TexLive 2014 on Ubuntu 14.10, which was installed fully online under the default settings.

Does tlmgr support update offline? and how?
Thank you very much.

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Welcome to the forum!

Do you have tlpkg/texlive.tlpdb which can be accessed? I guess some repository information is still missing. --repository localpath should work. Try without file://, such as --repository /home/tlnet, this is a documented way. I did not use a local repository though.

If it doesn't work and you would need certain newer packages, you could easily install them in TDS format. Such as for pgf to your local TeX dir:

unzip -d `kpsewhich --var-value TEXMFLOCAL` pgf.tds.zip

The backticks `` execute kpsewhich to return the path which is then used for unzip. But of course you can do it by hand.

Stefan

[yonggang]

Thank you, Stefan!
I tried your first suggestion, that is, remove the prefix 'file://', and it can find the files rightly.
But there's another question, how to change the referring path, such as TEXMFHOME? In the texmf.cnf file, I have changed it to the real path my texlive installed, but it still shows the path '$HOME/texmf' when I use command: kpsewhich -var TEXMFHOME.

The path problem really confuse me much.

[yonggang]

There's too many texmf file folds, such as /etc/texmf, /home/yonggang/texmf, /usr/share/texmf, /usr/local/texmf and many others. But my system always use the second, that is, /home/yonggang/texmf, I don't know when it was created. I am more familiar with Miktex in windows, but it does not support Linux.

[Stefan Kottwitz]

TEXMFHOME should not be changed to point to your TeX installation, it's for the user's home directory. There one can install personal packages which get priority over system packages. There are TEXMFMAIN and TEXMFDIST and TEXMFLOCAL ... if you would like to dive deeper, perhaps consult the TeX Live documentation. It should be well explained.

Under normal circumstances, TeX directory variables don't need to be changed. Instead, files should be placed at the intended path.

Stefan