Are there any compelling reasons to not avoid latex packaging and installing by using an online tool like sharelatex.com or writelatex.com ? They always seem up to date on latex packages and have a wide variety. I'm admittedly a latex-noob so I've only used it to create a few slides with beamer.
Academic here: sharelatex went down before a major conference deadline a few months back. I just use `git` and `make` for my latex workflow, but I learned several colleagues down the hall use sharelatex when they all shouted simultaneously :) (everything worked out OK for them though)
Version control is a good feature. I read that sharelatex.com is working on adding git based versioning but currently there's not much information about it.
It seems that there isn't an online editor that currently supports versioning through git/hg, which is too bad
I've spent many restless nights thinking about how to best integrate git and a web latex editor. It's a hard thing to do as there is a clash of philosophies. The web latex editors are about making your word processing as simple as possible with minimum required knowledge and effort. Git on the other hand requires a working knowledge of the Git versioning model before you can start doing anything with it. Forcing Git upon unfamiliar users would scare them away.
