May I then ask whether packages once downloaded by tectonic will not be downloaded again.
I am compiling a book manuscript that is package-heavy and I do not want the complete list of packages downloaded for each compile.
Finally, if repeated downloads of the same package do not happen, where does tectonic stash the packages it has already downloaded at some point in the past?
@PHPirates I don’t think that this is true. I love tectonic but it can’t replace TeXLive. There are some situations where you can’t replace pdftex with xetex (and so with Tectonic). And because tectonic do not allows -shell-escape we can’t use it with some packages, like minted, for example. And there are plenty more reasons to keep your LaTeX distro and to want to share it with tectonic.
@Kpym Of course it would be a nice optional feature. You are welcome to implement it in Tectonic to allow reusing package sources from elsewhere.
Note that this needs to take many situations into account, for example when Tectonic needs a package which is not present in TeX Live, it needs to interface with tlmgr to install the right packages, in order to keep the auto-download functionality present in Tectonic.