Problems caused by expired SSL certificate for purl.org

If you’ve been trying to compile new documents over the past few days, you may have run into problems because purl.org, the front-line service that redirects requests for the “default” Tectonic bundle, has an expired SSL certificate. This is a little frustrating since the whole point of purl.org is to do that one job with rock-solid reliability. But, here we are.

Fortunately (sort of), there is a workaround available, already documented here.

I have contacted the archive.org people, who are in charge of purl.org; hopefully this situation will be ironed out soon. It may be worth investigating alternatives — the purl.org domain is one that is embedded in the distributed binaries, so I want it to point to something that can be expected to work reliably into the indefinite future.

Argh. This is happening again. The current workaround URL is:

https://tectonic.newton.cx/bundles/tlextras-2018.1r0/bundle.tar

I will investigate alternative services since purl.org does not seem to be delivering the level of reliability we would like to have.

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OK, the just-released version 0.1.11 now embeds a link to archive.org. That’s the main URL for the people that are now in charge of the PURL system, so I expect it will be much more reliable.

So, in addition to the above workarounds, upgrading to 0.1.11 should help.