[tex-live] mirroring the texlive archive/ selectively

[Karl Berry]

            It seems that texlive.tlpdb contains all the necessary
            information to perform such a selective download, but is there a
            tool to utilize it?

We have never written a mirroring tool that reads tlpdb, since it never
came up for us.  I think it would be hard to write something that would
be of wide use, since everyone has different needs.  E.g., Phil posted
his mirroring scripts for Windows a couple weeks ago.  Naturally that is
different from yours ...

	For now, I'm using something like:

Looks reasonable to me.  I suspect rsync would be faster than wget.

	The ability to check the mirror against MD5 sums 

We don't bother with checksums.  If the .tar.lzma's can be unpacked,
then they are self-evidently correct.  If not, then not.

	and to rebuild the .tlpdb according to the selection being
	mirrored would also be nice.

That's two different operations.  Our principle is that you have a
"location" of the TL archive.  Then you install/update the actual TeX
installation from that "location", using tlmgr.  And that is what
rebuilds tlpdb.

After all, you might want to install from other places on occasion.

Thanks for writing,
Karl