Re: texlive distfile issues

[Mark Davies <mark%ecs.vuw.ac.nz@localhost>]

On 04/04/2026 23:16, Jonathan Perkin wrote:
> There are at least two issues:
>
>   * The primary MASTER_SITE is set to ftp://tug.org, which appears to be 
>     temperamental.  I can fetch from it from my home, but not from the 
>     network my macOS host is on (which is otherwise absolutely fine    
> fetching from the rest of the internet).  I don't know if they are    
> performing large network blocks or something.
>
>   * The texlive-20260301-source.tar.xz file downloaded from the second 
>     MASTER_SITE (https://mirrors.ctan.org) differs from the one    
> distributed by tug.org, and causes the BLAKE2s checksum failure.
>
> The latter in particular is really concerning.  Are upstream in a habit 
> of overwriting published distfiles or something?
>
> Given the unreliability of ftp://tug.org I think it would also make 
> sense to reorder the MASTER_SITES in texlive/Makefile.common, and 
> possibly add some additional upstream sites to avoid FTP issues.

So upstream are not in the habit of overwriting tarballs, in fact they 
are pretty good these days at writing a new versioned tarball for any 
change at all.  That being said there is definitely a difference in the 
tarball at tug.org and mirrors.ctan.org.

I'd only ever pulled from ftp://tug.org.  Thomas added the second 
MASTER_SITE a few days ago - presumably because of issues with tug.org.
Note that mirrors.ctan.org redirects to a random one of a set of mirrors.

I just checked and the tarball that I pulled from tug.org just now 
matches the one I pulled a couple of weeks ago from tug.org and the 
checksums in our distfiles.  I pulled it twice from mirrors.ctan.org (so 
from two different actual mirrors) and they were internally consistent 
but differed from the one at tug.org.

The difference being  mirrors.ctan.org's tarball had two extra files:
texlive-20260301-source/texk/texlive/configure~
texlive-20260301-source/utils/asymptote/doc/options

and  carriage return, linefeed -> linefeed changes in several others:
texlive-20260301-source/utils/asymptote/LspCpp/include/LibLsp/lsp/asio.h
texlive-20260301-source/utils/asymptote/gc/build/s60v3/bld.inf
texlive-20260301-source/utils/asymptote/gc/digimars.mak
texlive-20260301-source/utils/asymptote/tinyexr/deps/miniz/ChangeLog.md

So I don't think there is any functional difference in the two versions.

So what to do?

We could drop mirrors.ctan.org from MASTER_SITES and upload a copy of 
the tug.org tarball to ftp.netbsd.org.  That would be consistent with
what has happened in the last few years.

cheers
mark