[tex-live] Strange tlmgr output today

[jack]

On Mon, February 26, 2018 8:01 pm, Norbert Preining wrote:
> On Mon, 26 Feb 2018, jack wrote:
>
>> OK, I will try again, but I am having trouble making sense of your
>> explanation.  I only ever sync against one mirror (mirrors.rit.edu), so
>> I
>> don't see how that mirror could've become more recent than itself.  For
>> the same reason, I also don't see how my local clone could possibly be
>> more recent than mirrors.rit.edu.
>
> But this is the only explanation. May you did
> tlmgr --repository ctan update --all or something similar. I don't see
> another reason, if you haven't edited the tlpdb by hand.

I have done no such thing, nor have I edited a tlpdb by hand.  I sync the
repo via a script, so I never mistype the command.  Also, this happened on
more than one of my machines.  So there must be another explanation.

Perhaps something funny happened to mirrors.rit.edu---like maybe it went
down and had to be restored from a previous state.

Or: is it ever the case that a newer set of packages has to be reverted
and pulled from the main repo, and so some people get stuck with newer
versions that are no longer available on the mirrors?  (I notice that most
of the packages in the output are l3*, and there was just very recently a
problem with those mentioned on this list.)

-Jack