[OS X TeX] i-installer MD5 checksum errors

[Gerben Wierda]

On Tuesday, Nov 5, 2002, at 08:45 Europe/Amsterdam, Dr. Paul Fons wrote:

> First off, let me thank you for all your efforts for the macintosh TeX 
> community.  I wanted to ask if the MD5 checksum error I am receiving 
> is a result of a bad upload or a problem on my end.  Using RC3b 
> i-installer, I upgraded my tex package to the latest version (this was 
> about a week ago).  Just of our curiosity, I downloaded the new 
> version i-installer and found when I attempt to update, my texmf 
> package using the package:
>            http://www.math.utah.edu/ftp/pub/i-packages/texmf.ii2
>
> I received the error
>  The check of the remote package md5 checksum failed.
>
> This happened for both the TeX Foundation package and TeX program 
> packages (http://www.math.utah.edu/ftp/pub/i-packages/texbinaries.ii2) 
> for both the yale and utah servers (I tried both).  Any idea of what 
> might be happening?  Thanks.

A possible reason is that there is a cache between you and where your 
are downloading from and this cache is misbehaving. It is offering you 
an old version of the checksum or the table of contents even if there 
is a new version available *and* it is instructed by i-Installer to 
ignore caching (check your preferene setting on this).

An other possible reason is that you have been trying to update while 
the package was being updated. There is a protection against this in 
i-Installer, but this depends on the packages being downloaded in a 
certain way, and I haven't implemented that here yet. But if this is 
reproducable (i.e. it happens when you hit update again say 5 minutes 
later) this is not the cause.

It is as far as I know impossible for there to be another cause. 
i-Installer downloads the new table of contents and saves this 
(reporting download or writ errors along the way). Then it checks the 
new table of contents (which has been downloaded) against the remote 
md5 checksum.

G

(This information has been added to http://www.rna.nl/ii.html)


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