versioned container testing

[Dmitry Kalinkin]

Hi,

This is great news! For our texlive package in nixpkgs we had to make
our own mirror for a snapshot of the archive/ so that checksums would
not expire. I've noticed that in your test repository you seem to
retain the old versions of the packages as well. Will that behaviour
be the same in the final implementation of the feature? If yes, this
would free us from a burden of maintaining our own snapshot.

Best regards,
Dmitry

On Tue, Nov 19, 2019 at 7:02 PM Karl Berry <karl at freefriends.org> wrote:
>
> Norbert and I have been working on the versioned TeX Live "container"
> stuff for a while now (previously requested/discussed at
>   https://tug.org/pipermail/tex-live/2019-August/044030.html etc.).
> Thus, on the server, tlnet/archive/foo.tar.xz would be a
> symlink to foo.r12345.tar.xz instead of the plain file.
>
> A test repository with such symlinks is available at
> http://tug.org/texlive/test-tlnet.  I update it pretty much every day
> (by hand).
>
> If anyone can give it a try, in whatever way, that would be great. Both
> installation and (more importantly) tlmgr updates. I suggest using a
> test installation, not anything critical, in case of unexpected problems.
>
> Any up-to-date installation should work with it. An older installation
> will need the --self update from current tlnet first, else
> there will be mysterious errors from tlmgr. Here is my description of that:
>   http://tug.org/texlive/tlmgr.html#verpkg
>
> The test-tlnet repository (i.e., its /archive/ subdir) is "mixed", with
> both versioned (recently updated) and unversioned (unchanged) packages.
> This seems to work out ok and feels less overwhelming than changing
> everything at once. We'll switch all packages to being versioned with
> the TL20 release.
>
> The one thing which we know won't work with versioned containers is a
> Windows machine being the repository. That is, someone rsync-ing tlnet
> to a local Windows machine and then using that local dir as their
> server, unless symlinks are supported on the Windows machines involved.
> (I am not actually sure if this works now.) I mentioned it in my
> followup msg
>   https://tug.org/pipermail/tex-live/2019-September/044086.html
> without any objections, so we hope this won't be an issue.
>
> We hope to make this be the new reality in a few more days. So
> please try test-tlnet if you can, and thanks. --karl.