TeX Live Manager News June 2015

TeX Live 2015 has been released, and normal operation with daily updates has started. During the freeze time and afterwards I have made a few changes to the TeX Live Manager (tlmgr) that I want to highlight here.

The main changes are better error and return code handling (which should be hardly visible for the users), and more more informative output of the tlmgr info action, incorporating more data from the TeX Catalogue.

Error handling

With a program that started as an experiment that has grown into the central configuration and management program, there are lots of old code pieces that did not do proper error signaling via return values. That meant that the return value of a tlmgr run didn’t have any meaning, mostly because it was 0 (success) most of the times.

I have now tried to do proper return code handling throughout the tlmgr code base, that is the tlmgr.pl and the necessary Perl modules.

While this should not be a user visible changes, it turned out that the MacOS TeX Live Utility by Adam Maxwell (btw, a great program, it would be nice to have something similar written for Unix replacing the bit clumsy tlmgr gui), got broken for paper configuration, due to forgotten return value fixes in the TLPaper.pm module. That is fixed now in our repository.

All in all we do hope that the return value of a tlmgr run now gives proper information about success or error. I might add a bit more semantics by returning bit-values in case of errors, but this is in early stages of thinking.

TeX Catalogue data in tlmgr info

Since more or less the very beginning we incorporated information from the TeX Catalogue into our database. In particular did we carry over the license information, version, CTAN directory, and date of last change of information in the Catalogue.

Recently (or not so recently, I actually don’t know), CTAN has enriched their package view with more information, in particular a list of topics, and a list of related packages. Take for example the Asana-math package. It’s CTAN page now displays besides the previously available information also a list of topics and a list of related packages. The topic index can also be browsed directly when searching for a specific package.

I have now added functionality in the TeX Live Manager that tlmgr info also prints out the topic names and related packages. In the case of Asana Math fonts, that would look like:

$ tlmgr info Asana-Math
package:     Asana-Math
category:    Package
shortdesc:   A font to typeset maths in Xe(La)TeX and Lua(La)TeX.
longdesc:    The Asana-Math font is an OpenType font that includes almost all mathematical Unicode symbols and it can be used to typeset mathematical text with any software that can understand the MATH OpenType table (e.g., XeTeX 0.997 and Microsoft Word 2007). The font is beta software. Typesetting support for use with LaTeX is provided by the fontspec and unicode-math packages.
installed:   Yes
revision:    37556
sizes:       doc: 9k, run: 1177k
relocatable: No
cat-version: 000.955
cat-date:    2015-06-02 20:04:19 +0200
cat-license: ofl
cat-topics:  font font-maths font-otf font-ttf
cat-related: stix xits
collection:  collection-fontsextra

GUIs could use the topic names and related packages to link directly to the CTAN page.

At the moment the related packages are named according to CTAN standards, which are a bit different from what we use in TeX Live. I am not sure whether I will change that, or ship out both names. We will see.

The changes are currently in testing, see section about Test version here, and will be pushed out in due time, probably in the next week.

As usual, in case of any problems or bugs, please contact us at the TeX Live mailing list.

Enjoy.