The texlive bundle wasn't updated since 2018?

doronbehar · September 16, 2020, 9:12am

So here I am, running tectonic 1.1.15 on a new computer for the first time, and I see this:

note: connecting to https://archive.org/services/purl/net/pkgwpub/tectonic-default
note: resolved to https://tectonic.newton.cx/bundles/tlextras-2018.1r0/bundle.tar
note: downloading index https://tectonic.newton.cx/bundles/tlextras-2018.1r0/bundle.tar.index.gz

I also noticed https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic-staging hasn’t had commits since 2018. Is it supposed to be updated periodically? Manually or by a CI?

PHPirates · September 16, 2020, 10:10am

Updated when @pkgw feels like it… I don’t know if he’s up for automating that

doronbehar · September 17, 2020, 6:45am

Would @pkgw be willing to accept a PR that will setup GitHub actions to automate that?

pkgw · November 1, 2020, 6:15pm

Good news, sort of! As I just posted, the work to update to TexLive 2020.0 is more or less complete, I hope, and ready for testing.

As part of this work, I did a lot to tidy up the way that I’ve been generating the bundles. This is found in the new repository tectonic-texlive-bundles and does a lot to improve the bundle-creation process. It still, however, depends on checking out the TeXLive Git mirror, which is quite large. I hope that this will lower the barrier-to-entry for folks to contribute to the bundle creation process.

Anyway, I would be very interested to increase the level of automation in this process! Some care is needed because changes to the included files sometimes interact with updates to the core engine code, and updates to that are not automatable. But with a good test suite, we more frequent bundle updates should be pretty safe.

Nils · October 20, 2021, 11:14am

Hi, sorry if this is the wrong place to ask, but I’m trying to build a document that uses recent features of siunitx (\unit{}, \num{}, \qty{}), however it seems to be that the version of siunitx used is one that is older.

What can I do? (to help, or fix my problem)

PHPirates · October 20, 2021, 11:53am

What version of Tectonic are you using? Ensure it is the latest.
You could check the exact version of siunitx you are using to be sure.

Nils · October 20, 2021, 5:30pm

I’m using version 0.8.0. How can I check the version of siunitx being used?

PHPirates · October 20, 2021, 5:51pm

Nils · October 21, 2021, 4:24pm

It’s using siunitx 2020/02/25 v2.8b which is outdated and doesn’t support the commands I was referring to (\qty was added in v3.0.0).

How can I make tectonic to use newer packages?

PHPirates · October 22, 2021, 10:29am

I don’t that that is very easy to do at the moment, not sure what would be easiest. I think you can specify a different bundle url, but not sure if a sufficiently up to date bundle is available already. You could also try to just put the updated package files in the cache directory, but that’s really hacky and not sure it works.

Try raising an issue about how to update specific packages on github (https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic/issues) maybe someone has a better suggestion (@pkgw )