Re: Current texlive-full package fails

Hello, all,

Jumping in here, after seeing Pamela's report of the issue on the TeXLive list.

Moin Rahman mentioned:

> However although upstream mentions that using latest package it's easier
> said than done. The way CTAN packages are released with no specific
> version info in the dist file it is not easy to port/package a CTAN
> package. As the upstream might change the upstream distfile while we
> are not aware the version has changed and our build system will fail
> because the checksums will no longer match. Because the file name is
> always the same. Due to this reason we actually package/update tex
> related ports only once a year when texlive releases their yearly
> release.

The TeXLive upstream distribution is certainly tricky to package, but I don't think the current FreeBSD package is doing quite the right thing here.

The way things have turned out, it looks like the pdflatex command in the path invokes a pre-release (ie, testing/dev only) version of the program.  I think that goes against the intentions of the upstream package, even in the 'latest' version of the ports tree.

As you note, Moin, TeXLive makes its releases once a year, usually May/June, with a code freeze around April (IIRC) but a fairly flexible schedule for testing, and a flexible target release date.  It may be that that process hadn't completed when the FreeBSD packaging was done, this year.

I'm only a spectator there, but my impression is that the single annual 'official' release is the only recommended one, and it's intended to be complete as-is (ie, it's rather FreeBSD-like in its distribution goals!).  TeXLive says, of their release:

> The set of packages and programs that were included in the official release will most likely suffice unless you know that you specifically need updates made since then. That set is also the only one which gets tested as a coherent release.

Thus (if I follow what's happening) it's probably not necessary for the FreeBSD process to interact with CTAN at all, but just include whatever snapshot of it is in the annual TeXLive release.  If particularly interested users want to update their installation between releases, with tlmgr, they can do so locally, but I don't think the ports tree has to care about that at all.

You'll probably have seen [1].  The link there to the FreeBSD port [2] includes mention of 'texlive-base-20250308_2', which might be just _before_ the actual release.

For what it's worth, the various Linux packagings of TeXLive also have their troubles.  I help manage a number of Linux boxes, and as part of the provisioning process there we choose to install the upstream TeXLive distro rather than use the Linux distro's package of it, because the latter always seems to have _some_ annoying glitch.

Best wishes,

Norman


[1] https://tug.org/texlive/distro.html
[2] https://ports.freebsd.org/cgi/ports.cgi?query=texlive&stype=all

-- 
Norman Gray  :  https://nxg.me.uk