Annual upgrade

[Norbert Preining]

Hi Patrick,

On Wed, 27 Mar 2024, TeX Live Mailing List wrote:
> For some reasons, it failed. It took me five hours to get a running TeX Live
> again, and I pestered some friends for help. I really dislike annoying people,
> and I wasted time.

[...]

> provide all their knowledge to make these commands running. But why doesn't it
> do the yearly upgrade too, based on actual running system? Why do I have to get
> in that complex process and type commands that I only use one time per year?

There is a variety of reasons, first of all, upgrade between releases is
not *always* supported. In the past we have made changes that required a
new installation.
Then, supporting the upgrade in particular on Windows is hard to
impossible to do without writing a specific upgrade program.

You haven't told us *what* went wrong, so not much to help here.

And no, tlmgr is not APT, because it has to do much more than APT, it
has to run un 15+ different OS and ARCH combinations, while APT just
runs on Linux. Most people underestimate the complications we are facing
due to multi-os multi-arch support.

Bottom line: Without a proper bug report on what went wrong, we cannot
improve the system, and we on purpose WANT people to do reinstallations
since cross-release updates are not simple.

Best regards

Norbert

--
PREINING Norbert                              https://www.preining.info
arXiv / Cornell University   +   IFMGA Guide   +   TU Wien  +  TeX Live
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