Tlmgr: there is documentation but no executable in the distro

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1

I was looking at LaTeX - Wikibooks, open books for an open world which talks about using tlmgr to get information about the TeX Live setup on my system. I see documentation for it, but no executable using the YaST software manager. I don’t know if it’s obsolete, useless, dangerous, or evil. But having documentation without the executable is disconcerting. Is the absence of tlmgr intentional?

2

I think, texlive is build without tlmgr:

pushd ${prefix}/bin/
	tar -cpSf - . | tar -xvspSf - -C %{buildroot}%{_bindir}/
	rm -vf %{buildroot}%{_bindir}/tlmgr
	rm -vf %{buildroot}%{_bindir}/tlshell
	rm -vf %{buildroot}%{_bindir}/installfont-tl
	rm -vf %{buildroot}%{_bindir}/tlcockpit
    popd
3

The texlive package fails to build for Leap 15.6: see here for details.
You may have better chances with Tumbleweed.

4

Given TUG’s own documentation on distro integration states that tlmgr is not used when TeXLive is installed from your distro’s repositories, it’s clear that tlmgr’s absence is intentional.

Since you’re installing TeXLive via OpenSUSE’s repositories, you’re expected to manage all TeXLive packages with zypper/YaST. Otherwise you’d end up with some kind of hotchpotch of packages of different origin and/or different/incompatible versions.

1 Like
5

This is perfectly normal and intentional, since you installed texlive from the opensuse repositories.

TLMGR is the package manager used to manage a native Texlive.

In other words, an online installation or by the (graphical) installer from the ISO as describe here

The TeX Live Guide—2025 is available :

Note that if you want to install a native texlive, you will need before, to install GitHub - rolfn/texlive-dummy-opensuse: A "dummy-package" for TeX Live.