Is there a tool/script available to simply install packages locally?

Question

This question is not on how to manually install packages but how to install packages automatically via script. This question is not about MikTeX or the limited tex package management in certain linux distributions (e.g.Ubuntu).

This question is about the cases where those management tools are not available or when we don't want to mess with them or where they are not sufficient.

Question: Is there a script or tool that can install an arbitrary package by downloading it and installing it in the local tree?

The closest I got to that is the following script (which has lots of drawbacks):

PACKAGE=$1
mkdir -p ~/texmf
cd ~/texmf
wget http://mirror.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/$PACKAGE.zip
unzip $PACKAGE.zip
mkdir -p tex/latex/$PACKAGE
cd $PACKAGE
for a in *.dtx; do if [ -a $a ]; then latex $a; fi; done 
for a in *.ins; do if [ -a $a ]; then latex $a; fi; done 
cd -
cp -vf $PACKAGE/*.{sty,def,cls,cfg} tex/latex/$PACKAGE
texhash

It is pretty generic BUT the drawbacks include: not error resilient, does not track dependencies, it doesn't work for all packages, it can produce a mess of files sometimes if the script fails, it doesn't work for packages outside of contrib. Also it doesn't work for complicated packages and bundles.

The idea is to be able to just type, for example:

$ install_package pdfcomment 

Improvements to this script, or alternative tools or scripts are greatly appreciated. I'll be really happy for example, if it works for all these packages that are not available in the cluster (i.e. no root access) I use:

xkeyval oberdiek pgf pgfplots acrotex movie15 datetime filecontents
changepage paralist textcase placeins cool coollist coolstr coolstr
forloop bbm type1cm lastpage pdfmarginpar standalone tufte-latex ifpdf

EDIT: Thanks Seamus for the answer, it seems that a more robust script for TDS prepackaged packages is the following:

$PACKAGE=$1
mkdir -p ~/texmf
cd ~/texmf
wget http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/install/macros/latex/contrib/$PACKAGE.tds.zip
unzip $PACKAGE.tds.zip
texhash

(not all packages have a TDS version.)

Answer 1

A lot of the time, the TDS is a good option. You download package.tds.zip put it in your local texmf tree and unzip it. It puts all the files exactly where you want them.

This doesn't track dependencies, however.

Answer 2

alfC suggested elsewhere that my script might be "a good answer" to his question, so I'll give it a shot. The script is used instead of your favourite latex compiler; it both calls the compiler and detects missing packages to install in TeX Live. In short, it allows TeX Live "installation on the fly" similar to MiKTeX.

Dependencies: TeX Live (with its package manager, tlmgr), python (either 2 or 3 will do).

Script info + links: http://www.latex-community.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=15194

As you can see from the dependencies, the script isn't a complete solution in itself, but rather "automates" TL's existing package management system. Technically, I believe tlmgr install [packagename] satisfies the requirements of the original question, but I suppose this counts as an "improvement" by allowing automatically running that (as well as the search) command while you're compiling.

I'm not sure if tlmgr's dependency resolving is already perfect, but even if not, the script will catch the rest of them. That's because all it does is repeatedly run the compiler until there are no more missing package errors (or until a failsafe, of course) and in the process of doing so, it should install all required packages! Note that, while it catches a fair number of fonts (thanks to Ulrike Fischer), the font algorithm is probably not perfect.

Update: Version 1.00 now allows you to set a custom TeX Live bin directory and defaults to non-sudo, thereby (I think) answering the rest of the question.