[tex-live] bug of auto_remove_install_force_packages routine in tlmgr.pl

[Dohyun Kim]

2009/9/8 T T <t34www at googlemail.com>:
> 2009/9/7 Dohyun Kim <nomosnomos at gmail.com>:
>> Today's update of texlive2009 pretest has deleted some locally
>> installed packages on my system.
>
> By default, tlmgr will try to keep the local installation in sync with
> the server as much as possible. It is normal that some packages get
> removed automatically if they disappear on the server (otherwise it's
> a bug). Use -no-auto-remove option to prevent any removals during
> update.
>

tlmgr.pl has comments at line 1543ff:

  # check for new/removed/forcibly removed packages.
  # we start from the list of installed collections in the local tlpdb
  # which are also present in the remote database
  # and expand this list once with expand_dependencies in the local tlpdb
  # and once in the tlmedia tlpdb. Then we compare the lists
  # let A = set of local expansions
  #     B = set of remote expansions
  # then we should(?) have
  #     B \ A  set of new packages
  #     A \ B  set of packages removed on the server
  #     A \cup B set of packages which should be checked for forcible removal

Current tlmgr.pl just ignores the condition mentioned at
the third line of this comment, that is
"which are also present in the remote database."
This is a bug, undoubtedly.

Korean TeX community has a regional repository,
which contains packages that have not been uploaded to ctan
because of a license issue and some other issues.
In this local repository we have a package "collection-kotex".

In its process of auto-removing, tlmgr should not include
this collection package as a criterion of selecting packages
to be removed. However, current tlmgr reads all collections
regardless of its existence in the remote repository.

As a result, yesterday, packages installed by "collection-kotex"
have been deleted. Moreover, when a script file stated another
run of tlmgr, this time with the option of regional repository,
more than 1800 packages installed from official repository
have been removed. I was off the computer monitor while
this script was running, so the catastrophe.

As texlive team permits regional repository (see
http://tug.org/svn/texlive/trunk/Master/tlpkg/doc/repository-setup.txt )
and if this policy has not been changed recently,
current behavior of tlmgr must be a bug.

Best,
Dohyun Kim