Upgrade failure and corrupted installation ?

[Yann Salmon]

> Hmm, then I would suggest
> 	tlmgr check files
> to be sure all files mentioned are present

It lists an enormous number of files "Files present but not covered ".

If I use the tlpdb from my laptop, it conversely lists lots of file 
covered but not present. I think this could be a job for tlmgr install 
--reinstall, but it does not take an --all option.

> 
>> If I understand correctly, tlmgr update begins reading texlive.tlpdb, then
>> destroys it in order to rewrite it as the update goes. This seems very
>> unsafe.
> 
> Not really. Every update of a single package is treated separately, and
> after each update the tlpdb is saved.

The whole 17MB of tlpdb are rewritten when updating each package ?


>> Unable to download the checksum of the remote TeX Live database,
>> but found a local copy, so using that.
> 
> That again was on request from many users. Even if the remote cannot be
> read, still continue. This allows doing
> 	tlmgr search
> etc even when offline.
> 
> I agree that it might be good to "disable" this functionality for
> "upgrade" or "install" actions.

Yes indeed. Although I do not quite understand why search would need 
network access — that may be because my experience mainly consists in 
using apt and git, where the idea is rather to separate "remote-related" 
operations, and actual, complicated operations on your local copy (ie. 
apt update / apt upgrade ; git commit / git push).

This is also why, probably, I could not envision that tlmgr update would 
intertwine such a failure and interruption prone operation as 
downloading things and such a critical task as (re)writing the whole 
local database (if I got this right at last !).

-- 
Cordialement,

Yann Salmon