differences between daily snapshots and CTAN

Norbert Preining norbert at preining.info
Sat Jun 12 14:44:55 CEST 2021


> Say I download a file from https://texlive.info/tlnet-archive/2021/01/08
> with a particular revision number, and an identically named file from an
> up-to-date CTAN mirror. How confident can I be that the file content will
> be identical, byte-for-byte?

What "file" are you talking about?

If you are talking about the TL containers in 
	tlnet/archive/$pkg.rNNNNNN.tar.xz
etc, then yes, you can be 100% confident. These files are rsync copies
of the master.

> not architecture specific binaries. I assume that you only rebuild a
> package when its revision number goes up.

I don't understand the sentence.

Containers (.tar.xz files) are rebuild only when the revision number
changes.

> My use case is reproducibility: if I want to reproduce an old snapshot, I'd
> like to leverage CTAN mirrors as much as possible before relying on
> https://texlive.info.

That should work, if the filename ($pkg.rNNNNN.tar.xz etc) is the same.
You can pick the one from CTAN or texlive.info, and both will be the
same.

Best

Norbert

--
PREINING Norbert                              https://www.preining.info
Fujitsu Research  +  IFMGA Guide  +  TU Wien  +  TeX Live  + Debian Dev
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