[tex-live] Proposal for distribution snapshots

Nelson H. F. Beebe beebe at math.utah.edu
Sat Feb 7 21:33:24 CET 2004


Sebastian Rahtz writes in response for my proposal to daily snapshots
of the TeX-Live project:

>> sounds eminently reasonable. you mean starting now?

Sure, if someone with the suitable access to Perforce and the TUG site
can set up a cron job to do so.  I gave examples of three kinds of
compression: I'd go for the one offering maximal compression (bzip2)
if we anticipate storing daily snapshots for now on.

One useful economization, however, is to have the cron job record a
timestamp, and then check the archive for files newer than that
timestamp; if there is nothing new, there is no need to create a new
snapshot.  There will certainly be days when this happens.  To assure
remote users that the whole process hasn't ground to a halt, the cron
job should create a small file named LATEST-IS-yyyy-mm-dd every time
that it runs, so that the timestamp of that file reflects the last
cron run.

Hans Hagen correctly notes that the snapshots may some day be of
interest to historians.  In view of the ongoing SCO vs everyone
lawsuit and the court appearance here in Salt Lake City yesterday, it
could be even be legally useful:

	http://www.sltrib.com/2004/Feb/02072004/business/136590.asp

Yesterday's paper carried this story about SCO CEO Darl McBride:

	http://www.sltrib.com/2004/feb/02062004/business/136053.asp

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