[tlu] revision vs. catalogue-version

[Bruno Voisin]

> Le 17 sept. 2019 à 03:58, Adam R. Maxwell via tlu <tlu at tug.org> a écrit :
> 
> Hi Karl,
> 
>> On Sep 16, 2019, at 15:52 , Karl Berry <karl at freefriends.org> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi Adam - as you know, I don't use TLU,
> 
> The day you switch to a Mac is the day we ice skate on sulfur :).

Reminds me of my first contact with TeX back in 1991. Having just got a PhD and a research position at the French CNRS, I asked about TeX (which I had heard mentioned by some fellow scientist, without knowing what this was) and was handed the Textures box set.

Textures came with two macro packages (apart from LaTeX): the midnight macros by Marcel van der Goot, and eplain by Karl. That's how (the eplain manual) I heard first about GNU, and was astonished to read there a criticism of Apple. I couldn't understand then how someone could be against the Mac. Now I understand (and know) a bit more.

> Presently, TLU shows the TL revision with the catalogue version
> in parentheses:
> 
> IEEEtran	Update available	38238 (1.8b)	51065 (1.8b)	563.1 KB
> 
> There was a reason I did this, but I no longer recall what it was.
> Just using the catalogue version should be sufficient; I think the
> TL revision was mainly there for my debugging initially. However,
> the catalogue version is definitely there.

I'm probably to blame for that. Having installed Perl/Tk and launched the tlmgr GUI, I noticed that it gave more version information than TLU (TLU back then had only showed the revision information, which I didn't really find useful).

So I asked (probably on the MacTeX list) whether it was possible to have the same information as with tlmgr. Adam asked whether tlmgr had some command-line option returning (what's now know as) the catalogue version, Norbert kindly added the option and Adam kindly used it to add the the information inside TLU.

Bruno