[tex-live] Feature requests tlmgr

[Pander]

On 2010-11-17 01:40, George N. White III wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 3:24 PM, Pander <pander at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> 
>> On 2010-11-16 20:20, George N. White III wrote:
>>> On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 9:43 AM, Pander <pander at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi all,
>>>>
>>>> I would like to propose the following feature requests for TeX Live.
>>>>
>>>> 1) Can the installer ask if a cron job will be installed that will check
>>>> twice a day if updates are available and will pop up tlmgr GUI? This is the
>>>> same idea as Ubuntu's update manager.
>>>>
>>>> 2) Can the installer offer an option to enable e-mail notification when
>>>> updates are available for server installation? This is the same idea as
>>>> http://www.digipedia.pl/man/doc/view/apticron.1/
>>>>
>>>> 3) Also provide documentation to enable, disable and configure this after an
>>>> installation has been done.
>>>>
>>>> Apticron is scheduled for 13:00 and 19:00 hours. Perhaps 13:10 and 19:10
>>>> would be conveniend times.
>>>
>>> What problem are you trying to solve?
>>
>> I would like to have automated notification when updates are available
>> for my desktop (pop-up) and for my server (e-mail). So I don't have to
>> chekc manually if updates are there for all the different systems.
> 
> Would having distro packages for TL (so you can get update notifications
> the same way you to for distro packages now) be a good solution?

Yes, but unfortunately Ubuntu is still shipping TeX Live 2009.
Meanwhile, I have gotten used to the frequent TeX Live updates which are
of high quality, so I like to keep using tlmgr.

Also, most GNU/Linux distributions are not really keen on volatile
packages so I do not expect that distributions can offer the same up to
date TeX Live as TeX Live can provide itself. For example Scribus is
also shipped as scribus-ng (development branch) in Ubuntu. Such an
initiative would be welcome for TeX Live too.

I hope, Ubuntu et al. will one day fix all this in a proper way so that
e.g. dependencies in font package are not conflicting anymore.

Fonts in TeX Live are much more up to date than the ttf-* packages. This
gives rise to all sorts of problems at the moment. I had to manually
delete the files in ttf-freefont because they were conflicting with the
newer files shipped by TeX Live and too many Ubuntu package dependencies
prevented me from deinstalling ttf-freefont the correct way.

>> Adam Maxwell has a good script for Mac. I will contribute my code for
>> Debian/Ubuntu.
>>
>> The download and upgrade processes itself work perfectly.
>>
>>  Here, updates run quickly, and it is good
>>> to see what is changing, so it isn't worth the bother to automate updates.  What
>>> is worthwhile is having a local mirror if you aren't near enough to a
>>> mirror site.
>>>
>>> If you have a partial installation, the local mirror provide
>>> convenient access to
>>> packages you don't have installed.   If you have a complete install then you
>>> need to download "everything", so if downloading is the bottleneck then a
>>> local mirror is useful.
>>>
>>> A couple years ago my systems ran 7/24 and were often running multi-day
>>> builds.  Now the builds mostly run in under an hour, so the system are
>>> turned on as needed.  Ubuntu and TL updates both use local mirrors.
>>>
>>
>>
> 
> 
>