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Finding, installing and updating packages for LaTeX is sometimes a pain in the neck. There are package managers for the so-called "modern" programming languages, like npm or yarn for Javascript, cargo for Rust, etc. These tools provide dependency-management, build and update and clean commands. I'm wondering about a similar tool for LaTeX.

Bence László
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    tlmgr ? I have not installed a latex package by hand for years. – David Carlisle Jun 08 '19 at 13:13
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    You also have TeX Live Utility for MacTeX, and MiKTeX console for… well, MiKTeX. – Bernard Jun 08 '19 at 13:37
  • Or just install all packages, then you have all dependencies covered (except for version conflicts etc.). There are currently a bit over 4000 packages in total, see https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/73247/how-many-latex-classes-and-packages-are-there-say-on-ctan. – Marijn Jun 08 '19 at 18:03
  • MikTeX have a good, package manager. – Sveinung Jun 08 '19 at 18:11
  • In LaTeX there are many ways to "build" or "clean" which may be handled by sophisticated tools like "arara" or LaTeXmk. That only depends on your document and not so much on your environment. Package management is different though, where your document does not matter but your distribution does. Hence, for both jobs there are good tools, but they are tailored to the jobs rather than assuming a standard which is not there. – TeXnician Jun 08 '19 at 18:32
  • Which operating system and which LaTeX distribution are you using? What are your complaints about the capabilities provided by that distribution? Do you need a CLI or would a GUI also do? – schtandard Jun 08 '19 at 18:36
  • @schtandard I'm using GNU/Linux, and a CLI-based solution would be better for me. – Bence László Jun 08 '19 at 18:43
  • Theoretically tlmgr has some kind of dependency handling, but for most packages those dependencies don't model the package dependencies completely, so this is more of a theoretical feature. On the other hand, people usually recommend full installs of TeX live, in which case dependency handling becomes somewhat unnecessary (all packages are there already). MikTeX has a feature to install missing packages on the fly, so there is not a lot of need for a proper package-based dependency handling either. ... – moewe Jun 10 '19 at 08:05
  • ... All packages distributed via TeX live and MikTeX are ready-to-use already and need no further configuration, so the make clean, make install equivalents of source are not needed there. If you download packages from CTAN directly you may or may not have to go through steps similar to "make install" on source (run the .dtx to produce a .sty for example), this is taken care of by tlmgr and MikTeX. – moewe Jun 10 '19 at 08:09

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