[tex-live] Off topic: copying tlnet

[Robin Fairbairns]

Norbert Preining <preining at logic.at> wrote:

> On Di, 02 Nov 2010, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> > (Wien) is currupted, so I wanted to try out rsync just for fun ...
> 
> ouch .. tuwien.ac.at? If yes let me know and I complain ;-)

rainer's already complained.  wouldn't hurt if you did so too -- we
don't have a record of email for a "manager" for the site, so rainer's
guessed.

> > sudo tlmgr option repository
> > rsync://rsync.dante.ctan.org/CTAN/systems/texlive/tlnet

(fwiw, rsync.dante.ctan.org == rsync.dante.de, and the README.mirrors
file only lists the latter.

> rsync is not supported as tlmgr repository.
> 
> > But using rsync that way apparently doesn't work, or at least it
> > doesn't work here.
> 
> It does not work.
> 
> > 1.) Is there any list similar to
> > http://miktex.org/pkg/Repositories.aspx that would also check health
> > of repositories? The file http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/CTAN.sites
> > apparently doesn't really help me since
> 
> The CTAN mirrors *should * be checked, otherwise they normally get
> kicked.

the ctan mirrors *are* checked, but rather weakly.  mirrors.ctan.org
uses the results of that check, and doesn't use anything that seems out
of date.

the one in question claims it mirrored cambridge this morning; that's
good enough for mirrors.ctan.org, but it's entirely possible that it's
simply run out of space on the ctan partition, and hence the corruption.

i guess we could run a comparison test every so often, but comparing 20
gbytes of stuff on a rather large number of mirrors is a bit stressful,
and we typically only do it between the three main sites.

> > 2.) When talking about "educating users to use rsync" ... I consider
> > myself a "lover of rsync" (after all, the TeX installation that I
> > provide is completely and only rsync-based), but still I have no idea
> > how I could use rsync for updating TeX Live (provided that I don't
> > want a second copy of "the whole CTAN" on my local hard drive as an
> > intermediate repository). Can anyone explain me how to use rsync for
> > TeX Live?
> 
> There is no other way but rsyncing the whle of tlnet to local disc
> and install from there. This is what I am doing.

it's easier if you have a ctan (or, i suppose, mirror) on your lan.  i
can nfs-mount my archive (read only).

robin