[tldistro] texlive.infra.r72854.tar.xz (and doc) missing from the mirrors

[Florian Schmaus]

On 21/11/2024 12.54, Norbert Preining wrote:
> Hi Florian,

Hi Norbert,
Hi Karl,

In reference to a mail from Karl regarding a compilation error in 
pdftexini.c with gcc-14:

Gentoo *always* uses the released source tarball for texlive-core

https://mirrors.ctan.org/systems/texlive/Source/texlive-20230311.tar.xz

and soon

https://mirrors.ctan.org/systems/texlive/Source/texlive-20240311.tar.xz

we do not use the current development sources. Instead we take those 
release tarballs and apply our patches, e.g., for modern C porting, on 
top of it.


>> Mostly for my enlightenment: what is the URL of the tlcritical repository?
> 
> ftp://tug.org/texlive/tlcritical
> 
>> I don't remember that I had to collect texlive.infra.r69740 from a special
>> repo when doing the tl 2023 bump in Gentoo a few months ago. But that's
>> probably just me not remembering. ;)
> 
> Probably you did pull the version number that was released.
> 
> How do you determine which versions to pull?

Now for tlpdb the situation is slightly different.

We use a fixed and stable version of the tlpdb to generate the list of 
CTAN packages along with their revision, which is sourced from the tlpdb.

Basically we take a commit from git.texlive.info/texlive to have a 
stable, i.e., the content of the reference does not change at a later 
point in time, reference to a particular version of the tlpdb.

For Gentoo's 2023 version of tl, this was a commit done shortly after 
the release of tl 2023.

As I only found time to work on tl 2024 a few days ago, the situation 
for tl 2024 is different: the commit we currently use is from a few days 
ago. Of course, we could easily use a different commit. I would be glad 
about guidance to select the right commit.


>> That would be appreciated, thanks! If everything in the (latest) tlpdb could
>> be fetched fetch from the same URL, then this eliminates special handling
> 
> That is already the case!! If you get the tlpdb from a normal CTAN
> mirror, *ALL* packages will be available.

If that is the case, or not, appears to depend on what one means with 
"latest tlpdb".

When I wrote "latest tlpdb", I simply meant the version of the tldpb 
found in the latest revision of texlive's source repository.

If I understand you correctly, then you refer to 
https://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet/tlpkg/texlive.tlpdb as 
"latest tldpb". However, if I am not mistaken, this version is not, or 
at least not always, equal to the latest version in texlive's source 
repository.

The *only* reason we are using a tldpb from git is that it provides a 
stable reference. Please correct me if I am wrong, but 
https://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet/tlpkg/texlive.tlpdb would 
be different next years from this year. This would make it unsuitable 
for our use case.

Maybe you could provide a URL to a tlpdb that is fixed to particular tl 
release? For example 
https://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet/20240311/tlpkg/texlive.tlpdb

In general, for downstream packagers it would be great to provide 
versioned resources. Unfortunately, the tlpdb does not seem to be one of 
them (besides via the detour over git).

Which URL to a stable version of the tlpdb should I use for TexLive 2024 
in Gentoo?

- Flow
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