[tex-live] tl2010: no backup for auto-removed pkgs

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 14 September 2010 Staszek Wawrykiewicz wrote:

 > On Tue, 14 Sep 2010, Harald Koenig wrote:
 > 
 > > I just run "tlmgr update --all" on my pristine tl2010 installation with 
 > > backups enabled:
 > > ...
 > >  [1/127] auto-remove: antp
 > >  [2/127] auto-remove: biblatex-chicago-notes-df
 > > ...
 > > and now I notice that there are no backup files for antp and 
 > > biblatex-chicago-notes-df :-(
 > 
 > ant is now obsolete (also on CTAN), and replaced by "poltawski",
 > thus was removed. biblatex-chicago-notes-df was replaced by
 > "biblatex-chicago".

Hi Staszek,
weren't you the first one who asked Norbert to provide backups?  I
thought that the initial idea was to provide a mechanism which allows
to revert to an older version of a particular package if a newer
version is broken.  Thus, if you regard older versions as obsolete, we
don't need backups at all.

You said that "antp" was replaced by "poltawski" on CTAN.  But there
is no way to find this out automatically.  From tlmgr's viewpoint
"antp" was removed and "poltawski" is a new package.

Assuming that backups are useful at all, in the first place they
should be kept/created whenever packages are removed.  Some people are
concerned that packages can be removed due to license issues.

I'm not absolutely convinced that backups are useful at all, but if
they are supported, they should work as expected, at least.   

Regards,
  Reinhard

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