TeX Live and Subversion (and Git)

This page is about accessing the development sources for TeX Live. Sources (as large tar files) for each release are available in the historic archive, under systems/texlive.

TeX Live uses the Subversion system for source control. Subversion must be used to commit changes, but is not needed (or recommended) simply for read-only access to the development sources.

For developers

For TL developers (wanting to commit changes):

• Initial developer setup for TeX Live.
• Basic Subversion usage.

For anonymous read access

For public (read-only, anonymous) access, there are a variety of methods:

• You can browse the repository via the web; this always reflects the current state of the repository. (Footnote: the ls-R and texlive.tlpdb files are excluded from browsing, since they are updated at least daily and generating their history for robots, etc., is a big load on the server. Use rsync or svn to view these files.)

• You can retrieve the compilable sources (only) via the rsync command:
  rsync -a --delete --exclude=.svn tug.org::tldevsrc/Build/source .
  This command will copy the repository contents to the current directory; the destination . can be replaced with any directory, as usual. If you leave off the ., it will list the (very many) files that would be copied. Once you have the files, another rsync with the same arguments will keep you updated. The master tree is updated every 20 minutes; you can see the last revision updated.

• If you want to retrieve the entire development tree, both source and runtime (12+gb), as opposed to only the sources (<2gb), replace tldevsrc/Build/source in the above with just tldevsrc.

• You can also retrieve the underlying Subversion database files via rsync:
  rsync -a --delete tug.org::tldevrepo .
  Naturally, this requires much more disk space than the previous option (35+gb and counting), but it is the most efficient way of getting all the history.

• Anonymous Subversion access is also supported:
  svn co svn://tug.org/texlive/trunk/Build/source
  Replace co with list to test the connection. Notice that's an svn: url, not http(s):.

  In this case, you must set the Subversion configuration value use-commit-times=yes. Otherwise, you will induce many unwanted dependencies (makeinfo, bison/flex, autotools, ...). All such generated files are up-to-date in the repository; for instance, if your build tries to remake tlbuild.info (in source/doc), it is almost certainly because you did not have use-commit-times set.

  To get the sources from a branch, e.g.:
  svn co svn://tug.org/texlive/branches/branch2018/Build/source

• Summary build instructions are available, intended especially for those building the binaries distributed with TL. The tlbuild manual has full details about the source organization, how to build, etc. README files throughout the sources have additional information.

Final tip: to use Subversion checkouts but still exclude some directories, such as Master/bin/arch for the architectures you don't use, you can merely avoid doing an update or checkout from the bin, Master, or top level, or use Subversion's sparse checkout feature.

TeX Live via Git

You can also use a full git mirror on texlive.info, or the github mirror of just sources.

However, the master is the Subversion repository on tug, so don't try to push changes via git.