[tex-live] collection-science

[Tomalak Geret'kal]

On 05/11/2016 22:34, Norbert Preining wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> too many emails, so just a few lines:
> * profiles have never been ment to be a general purpose tool for
>    installation, but mostly to enable restart of interrupted ones.
>    I know they are used a lot now.
>
> * I will improve profile handling in the installer:
>    - better support to create them from the installer
>    - warning/error when wrong keys are included
>    - short explanation of syntax of the file
Thank you - that would be perfect.
>> I don't know what a scheme is.
> Sorry, if you don't know what a scheme is then I am a bit
> surprised - did you ever install TeX Live yourselft?
Yes, many times - I am simply missing some terminology. I 
will research what a "scheme" is.
>
>> It may only be one line to fix it, but the effect is absolute failure - almost none of my docs built any more due to suddenly missing packages. Also, the failure was completely silent at the installation phase (the installation should have error'd out rather than just ignoring the removed collection) and I had to update and rebuild all 6 build server configurations in order to get usable systems again.
> It is not an absolute failure only because your documents do not compile.
> You asked to install a set of collection and they were dutifully installed.
Sorry but, no, they weren't! collection-science was silently 
/not/ installed, and it contained packages upon which I 
relied. An announcement on a mailing list that this would 
cease to work would have given me notice to update my 
profiles at a quiet and convenient time.

As it was, I only noticed this because I had to do an 
emergency rebuild of the server profiles for another reason, 
then the TeXLive rebuild didn't work as expected and this 
occurred at the worst possible time!

I concede that doing an install-latest-from-web in what is 
supposed to be a reproducible build server image is not 
ideal, and that's my fault. Eventually I want to have proper 
self-contained installs. Eventually, I will probably end up 
archiving TeXLive 201n locally and rebuild from that. If 
install-tl-unx.tar.gz were versioned then I could at least 
download a specific, known-good version and avoid exposing 
myself to breaking changes like this, but the web download 
doesn't seem to work that way.

Anyway, I'm glad that the cause has been determined and 
things will improve a little in the future.

Thanks for your help.

Cheers
Tom
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