[tex-live] revision numbers in texlive.tlpdb

François Charette firmicus at ankabut.net
Tue Nov 3 09:34:08 CET 2009


Norbert Preining wrote:
> Hi François,
>
> On Sa, 31 Okt 2009, François Charette wrote:
>   
>> To prepare the texlive packages for my particular distro, I have my own
>> script that uses your excellent Perl API, and it very simply happens to
>>     
>
> Like I do with Debian.
>   

For the record, and in case someone else might be interested to use
them, my scripts are available at:
http://projects.archlinux.org/users/francois/texlive-scripts.git/tree/

I have also written a shell and command-line tool (in Perl) for
end-users to locally update TeXLive in parallel to the official packages:
http://projects.archlinux.org/users/francois/texlive-localmanager.git/tree/
which is available from http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=23776

>> rely on those numbers. When a given package has been updated upstream
>> (that is, by you), my script will eventually update the source tarballs
>> from which the texlive packages for Arch Linux are  built. In other
>>     
>
> Yes, that is a good approach.
>
>   
>> words, the versions of the TL packages I maintain are based on those
>> revision numbers. The current situation means that next time I will
>> update the packages for our distro, which I only do every month or two,
>>     
>
> That is to be expected in pre-release times. I had to rebuild the
> Debian TL .orig.tar.gz already several times. This will happen until
> we release.
>   

Agreed. However (and this is my sole responsibility) the new texlive-*
packages for Arch Linux have been officially released two months ago :)
Very few bugs have been reported to far, and they all had to do with
minor packaging issues; otherwise you would have heard from me much more
often in the past two months!

> After that, the same might happen (although I just now fixed the code
> that such a disaster not will happen again becasue svn status dies ;-)
> we cannot change that. But we try to minimize non-code changes, not
> only for us, but for all the users of texlive proper, so that they
> don't have to re-download a package just we changed a space somewhere.
>
> The same is with you, we are sorry for that, but it happened ;-) And
> we try to reduce the probability that something similar
> happens again.
>   
I have no doubt about this.

>> Thanks for the explanation. Don't misunderstand me: I can live with
>> that. But my initial reaction was one of surprise that something might
>> have gone wrong without your being aware of it. You are of course
>>     
>
> Yes we were well aware of, as you could have seen from Karl's
> announcement to the list on which you have answered!!!
>
>   

Well, I had indeed read it but had already forgotten by the time I
encountered the actual issue!

Regards,
François



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