TeXLive 2020.0 bundle ready for testing

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Hi folks,

After what I know has been a very long wait, I have a beta version of an updated TeXLive 2020.0 bundle ready for testing. The short instructions are that you can test it with the following command-line argument:

tectonic -w https://ttassets.z13.web.core.windows.net/tlextras-2020.0r0.tar ...

I have bitten the bullet and started hosting the files off of a cloud storage that I’m paying for, rather than using free services; you should notice a significant speed increase when pulling down new files.

I recommend that you test this bundle using the just-released Tectonic version 0.3, which updates the engine implementations to TeXLive 2020.0. The bundle files should work with older versions, but the LaTeX format generation depends on some of the new primitives introduced in TL2020.0, so the internals will have substantial differences depending on whether you process documents using 0.3 or an older version. (In particular, expl3 related pieces won’t be enabled unless you upgrade.)

I have extracted the code to generate the bundle from the “staging” repository to a new tectonic-texlive-bundles repo, which should be a lot easier to understand because all of the reference-sources support is gone. I started a very primitive test suite in tests/ to test out compilations with new versions of the bundle.

Cross-posted on GitHub as tectonic-typesetting/tectonic#669.

2 Likes
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Thanks a lot! The download speedup is really significant indeed. I will go for this bundle from now on.

Probably unrelated: unfortunately the first random document I took on my computer is still not compilable by tectonic after these updates, while pdflatex succeeds… Don’t have the time to debug this, sorry, just want to let you know (document is not public).

! Undefined control sequence.
l.732 \blx@aux@read@bbl@mdfivesum
                                 {nobblfile}
No pages of output.
Transcript written on mylatexfile.log.
===============================================================================
error: 
caused by: the TeX engine had an unrecoverable error
caused by: halted on potentially-recoverable error as specified

TeX Live 2020, Tectonic 0.3.0

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This update is now live! Builds that trigger new file downloads should start pulling down the TeXLive 2020.0 bundle.

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@PHPirates Does this document use biblatex? I think that biblatex works with Tectonic in some cases, but it’s generally problematic due to our inability to shell out to external programs.

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Indeed it does. Ah, yeah I understand, thanks!