[tex-live] Reporting problem as requested by tlmgr

Karl Berry karl at freefriends.org
Wed Nov 5 01:39:00 CET 2008


    Just a silly question: doesn't bin-texlive and texlive.infra update
    automatically with the tlmgr update?

No, we wouldn't ever want something as touchy as tlmgr updates to be
done automatically.

    I could read the page as it had to
    be done by hand before each update ...

Well, of course it only changes infrequently, so you hardly need to run
it every time.

And, for people who are basically keeping up with changes, it's unlikely
to be a problem to issue one tlmgr update --all to get today's (or this
week's, or whatever) updates.

The main scenario I wanted to describe on that page was someone who was
starting from the DVD image and then doing an update.  A simple tlmgr
update --all in that case would not be good, because there have been
dozens upon dozens of updates.  If bin-texlive gets updated after the
first umpteen packages, and texlive.infra gets updated after the second
umpteen, the result won't be anything good.

Even more importantly, because of the mirror-switching problem in the
original tlmgr, the big update --all is highly likely to end up with a
mixture of versions.  Again, something to avoid.

It might have been smart to see if those packages needed to be updated,
do those updates first, and re-exec tlmgr after the update.  We weren't
that smart.

I'll try to add some more words about this.  By the way, I added the
stuff about disaster recovery and test versions that were previously
mentioned on the mailing list to the page
(http://tug.org/texlive/tlmgr.html) this morning.

Thanks,
karl


More information about the tex-live mailing list