[tex-live] revision numbers in texlive.tlpdb

François Charette firmicus at ankabut.net
Sat Oct 31 22:34:56 CET 2009


Norbert Preining wrote:
> On Sa, 31 Okt 2009, François Charette wrote:
>   
>> and to ny astonishment I find out that ALL packages now have a revision
>> number of 15878:
>>
>> $ grep -c -e "^revision 15878" texlive.tlpdb
>> 2372
>>
>> This is very bad for me, as I crucially depend on that parameter to
>> update and maintain the texlive packages for Arch Linux! Hopefully this
>>     
>
> What is the problem please???
>   

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
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
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,
I will have to re-download all packages from tug.org, instead of only
downloading those that have been actually updated. This is not too
dramatic as you see, just annoying, as I have to re-download everything
in order to make sure that my packages are up-to-date.

> Yes there was a problem, mayn .tlpsrc files where updated because 
> our update process crashed, well, but the revision number is *only* for
> the tlmgr to see when a package is to be updated.
>   

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
responsible for tlmgr only, and not for any use of its underlying
infrastructure that might be happening downstream :)

In any case, let me take the occasion to repeat what I have previously
said: many many thanks for your great work, and for the very useful Perl
modules which have made my task much simpler than it used to be until
last year!

Regards,

François Charette


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