Unexpected huge update. Please confirm it is expected.

[Max Chernoff]

Hi Sergio,

On Tue, 2025-11-25 at 09:57 +0100, Sergio Callegari wrote:
> Running |tlmgr update| I am today receiving 337 package updates on a
> system that has otherwise has constantly been kept up to date on an at
> least weekly basis.
>
> Since this seems huge in comparison to the usual flow of update (in the
> range of at most 10-20 packages each time), it would be nice to know the
> reason why. This is almost a full rewrite of the texlive tree on my
> system, as if it was a full upgrade to a new year release. Please be so
> kind to confirm that it is expected and not the result of some issue,
> the worst of which would be an infrastructure compromise.

Yes, this is to be expected.

Whenever a package is updated, TeX Live copies its catalogue entry from
CTAN into "texlive.tlpdb" so that "tlmgr info <package>" and other
similar commands give the correct results. However, the CTAN catalogue
entry will occasionally change without the package's contents updating,
so twice a month, TL forces an update to all packages so that any
changes are copied over. If there are no changes, then updating the
package (even forcibly) does nothing, and if there are, the automated
build scripts will copy in the correct data.

Over the past month, Karl and the CTAN team have made a bunch of changes
to the catalogue:

- The "bibtex-sty" topic was replaced with "bibtex-supp".
- The "etex" topic was removed.
- The "biblio" topic was removed from .bst/BibLaTeX styles.
- The "expl3" topic was removed.
- All descriptions were spellchecked and corrected.
- A few other small changes.

So any catalogue changes that were made over the past 3 weeks would have
all showed up today. According to r76924 in the SVN sources

    https://svn.tug.org:8369/texlive?revision=76924&view=revision&limit_changes=0

this should be roughly 427 packages, which is fairly close to the 337
updates that you received.

Thanks,
-- Max