[tex-live] Reporting problem as requested by tlmgr

Norbert Preining preining at logic.at
Wed Nov 5 15:07:51 CET 2008


Hi,

On Di, 04 Nov 2008, Karl Berry wrote:
>     Just a silly question: doesn't bin-texlive and texlive.infra update
>     automatically with the tlmgr update?
> 
> No, we wouldn't ever want something as touchy as tlmgr updates to be
> done automatically.

AFAI understood the question your (Karl) answer is wrong, you mixed our
updates of tlnet and the updates of the client.

Yes, calling
	tlmgr update --all
DOES update texlive.infra and bin-texlive, that is right.

The only thing is that *we* don't update these packages *from* the svn
repository *to* the tlnet automatically, only after testing and manual
intervention.

>     I could read the page as it had to
>     be done by hand before each update ...
> 
> Well, of course it only changes infrequently, so you hardly need to run
> it every time.

After you have done it *once* now you don't have to do it at all
manually. Normal update procedure will bring it.

The reason to do is separately the first time is that the tlmgr as
shipped on DVD is a bit buggy (to be friendly), better it is not very
much forgiving to networking errors etc.

I guess Karl had all that in mind when writing:

> The main scenario I wanted to describe on that page was someone who was
> starting from the DVD image and then doing an update.  A simple tlmgr
> update --all in that case would not be good, because there have been
> dozens upon dozens of updates.  If bin-texlive gets updated after the
> first umpteen packages, and texlive.infra gets updated after the second
> umpteen, the result won't be anything good.
> 
> Even more importantly, because of the mirror-switching problem in the
> original tlmgr, the big update --all is highly likely to end up with a
> mixture of versions.  Again, something to avoid.
> 
> It might have been smart to see if those packages needed to be updated,
> do those updates first, and re-exec tlmgr after the update.  We weren't
> that smart.

In this respect Karl is right. The reason is that bin-texlive and
texlive.infra are tightly coupled. We did the error to not merge them
into one package for the DVD, our failure, I didn't think of that. Now,
if one of the two is updated and the other not it might be a real
problem.

BTW Karl, we could ship tlmgr and the perl modules in *both*
texlive.infra and bin-texlive. Slight duplication but making life more
safe... WDYT?

> I'll try to add some more words about this.  By the way, I added the
> stuff about disaster recovery and test versions that were previously
> mentioned on the mailing list to the page
> (http://tug.org/texlive/tlmgr.html) this morning.

Yeah, that is fine. Thanks Karl.

Best wishes

Norbert

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Norbert Preining <preining at logic.at>        Vienna University of Technology
Debian Developer <preining at debian.org>                         Debian TeX Group
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