[tex-live] TeXLive 2015 on Mac; TeX Live Utility

Karl Berry karl at freefriends.org
Sat Jun 13 01:29:02 CEST 2015


Adam and all - the release-texlive.txt madness is my fault.
Profound apologies.

I changed things around this year so that the last line of
release-texlive.txt *in the released iso* (not in svn) once again
contains the date of release.  This was always intended to be the case,
and it actually was up until 2011.  Then in 2012-2014 it wasn't, for
various reasons.  Now in 2015 it is again.

Therefore the output of tlmgr version, in an installation from the iso
(or equivalent), is the four lines (exactly four lines):
-------
tlmgr revision 37488 (2015-05-23 19:58:40 +0200)
tlmgr using installation: /u/local/texlive/2015
TeX Live (http://tug.org/texlive) version 2015
texlive-20150523
-------
Thus, I dearly hope that TLU is looking specifically at the third line,
rather than the last nonblank line.  (People running from svn will see a
blank fourth line rather than the release date.)

My bug was that I failed to include release-texlive.txt into the
installer tarballs, that is, install-tl-unx.tar.gz and install-tl.zip.
Therefore an installation from those tarballs, dated 20150523, would not
have the file.  

This should be rectified with tonight's build, which I think will end up
being install-tl-20150613.  (Last night's build didn't happen, for
various reasons -- just as well, it turns out.)  I will check tomorrow
morning.  It's not a quick thing to test.

I believe that this is not a problem with the iso images.  People
installing either tl or mactex from the iso should get
release-texlive.txt, since it is there in the image.  I did plenty of
test installations from the iso and they seem ok.

What I don't understand is why this error did not show up until after
the official release.  Did no one ever try doing an install from the
final installer packager, install-tl-20150523, and then run TLU?
Evidently.  But it seems surprising, and makes me think that I may be
misunderstanding where the problem lies.

People just running tlmgr or install-tl, with --version or whatever,
would not notice the problem, because we carefully wrote those programs
not to worry if release-texlive.txt was not there.  It seemed like
"extra" information rather than "required" information; I'd totally
forgotten about TLU using it.  Hence my error.  Sigh.  I guess we should
change that to at least give a warning.

On another front, the release year is in tlpdb.  That somehow seems a
more reliable way to get the information than parsing the version
output.  Do you read tlpdb now (I think the answer is no, but just
asking)?  In any case, we could change tlmgr version to use that.

Best,
Karl

P.S. Sadly, I'll be offline the rest of today ... fingers crossed ...


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