[OS X TeX] Question about TL manager and package updates

[David Watson]

On May 13, 2009, at 9:53 PM, Adam M. Goldstein wrote:

> Hi all
>
> This is only really tangentially about TL manager---more about a  
> side-effect of its use.
>
> When I check for updates, often I find that the packages have  
> changed in size only by a few hundred kb. For instance, tonight, I  
> found that hyperref was listed as having changed, from 12,636kb to  
> 12,984kb. On the one hand, it could be that every line of code has  
> been rewritten and it came out to nearly the same length. Ok, that's  
> an exaggeration, but you get the idea. On the other hand, it might  
> be that nothing really important has changed, a bunch of comments  
> were added, or its managed to take up a small amount of space on a  
> new sector of the disk at CTAN and now the size is being reported as  
> bigger.
>

I think there is substance to your question. I was wondering the same  
when there were several "updates" to the achemso package, but no  
actual difference in functionality or documentation, and also, no  
updates by the author since around February. My guess was that it had  
something to do with the block size of the file-system of the mirror  
that supplied the update. Hopefully we will have some idea soon when  
the wizards chime in.

> Is my frequently checking for updates leading to downloading the  
> same packages again and again?
>
> I realize that there is no single answer to this question, but maybe  
> there is a general rule.
>
> Thanks all for considering my question.
<snip>