Am Sat, 12 Oct 2013 10:14:09 -0300
schrieb José Romildo Malaquias <j.romildo@gmail.com>:

> Hello.

Hi,

> What is the best way of updating a given LaTeX package in gentoo to the
> latest available version on CTAN?
> 
> The installed version of tcolorbox is 2.32, provided by
> dev-texlive/texlive-latexextra-2013, and I need version 2.51, available
> on CTAN.
> 
> There used to be a package called g-ctan that could be used in this
> situation. But it has been masked.
> 
> Any clues?

I was curious myself, and from what I found there are only two ways to go
about this:

- if you install texlive outside of portage, using for example the network
  install, you can use tlmgr to install packages
  (https://www.tug.org/texlive/tlmgr.html)

- install the package manually into $TEXMFHOME (usually ~/texmf, see the output
  of "kpsexpand '$TEXMFHOME'")

For both I found instructions at
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Installing_Extra_Packages (a pretty good
wikibook in general IMHO). Also, I found some better (AFAICT) instructions at
http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/30307/how-to-install-latex-zip-package-from-ctan-using-texhash-on-a-nix-system.

Or maybe you can see if you can get someone to update the g-ctan package,
which is masked due to incorrect dependencies (it depends on the now
non-existent texlive 2011 packages).

But really, I'm surprised that there doesn't seem to be a tool that can install
packages from CTAN locally into $TEXMFHOME directly.

HTH
-- 
Marc Joliet
--
"People who think they know everything really annoy those of us who know we
don't" - Bjarne Stroustrup