[OS X TeX] [WARNING - NOT VIRUS SCANNED] TeX Live 2016 Pretest

[Richard Koch]

Folks,


TeX Live 2016 (and thus MacTeX-2016 and BasicTeX-2016) have
entered the pretest phase. For information on the pretest,
see

	http://www.tug.org/texlive/pretest.html

As this TUG page states, “the TeX Live community greatly appreciates
all testing of TeX Live. But do not test with the expectation that
“everything should work perfectly” (it won’t), but rather “I’ll try this
out and see if I can help improve it.”

On the pretest site, the install packages for OS X are named

	mactex-20160416.pkg

and

	mactex-basictex20160416.pkg

These packages were just uploaded to TUG and will appear by Sunday
on tlpretest mirror sites listed on a link from the tlpretest page.
Both support OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and higher, on both Intel and PPC.

The pretest web page lists significant changes. Here are a few:

	1) MacTeX no longer installs the TeX Dist Preference
	Pane (but it leaves existing panes alone). Apple made
	it difficult to support Preference Panes by constantly
	changing the programming requirements, and the functionality
	for choosing an active TeX distribution is now in 
	TeX Live Utility.

	2) The distribution contains Ghostscript 9.19. As earlier, this
	distribution knows about various TeX Live fonts. In addition,
	the package has been compiled to be compatible with Norbert
	Preining’s script for CJK support in China, Japan, and Korea.
	This script is in TeX Live. Users in these countries can
	run

		sudo cjk-gs-integrate

	in Terminal to set up support. See the document titled Ghostscript
	installed in /Applications/TeX for details.

	3) TeX Live’s tlmngr has support for gpg security when installing
	or updating TeX Live. OS X usually does not have gpg, and in that
	case tlmgr reverts to the old behavior. If gpg is installed in
	OS X, tlmgr will use it. Installations are available from Fink
	and MacPorts. I’m partial to a help file at

	http://macgpg.sourceforge.net/docs/howto-build-gpg-osx.txt.asc

	which explains exactly how to obtain the source and compile gpg
	for users who already have Apple’s XCode. This installation does
	not clutter /usr/local with additional library files.

	4) During the pretest phase, you can update using TeX Live
	Utility, by setting the repository to a tlpretest mirror site.
	For instance, I set it to

	http://ftp.math.utah.edu:80/pub/texlive/tlpretest/

	Please use the list of mirror sites linked from the tlpretest
	web page and select a site close to your location.

	5) There has been a dramatic restructuring of the LuaTeX code.
	This will make it much easier to maintain in coming years, but
	may cause some problems this year. In preliminary testing, LuaTeX
	compiled most straight LaTeX files. But it crashed when
	using Robertson’s fontspec, a crucial package when using system
	fonts. This crash can be avoided by adding a file
	~/Library/texmf/tex/luatex/luaotfload-blacklist.cnf containing
	one line of text:

	LastResort.ttf

	The programmers know of this bug, so it should be fixed in the
	release version of LuaTeX.

Special care is required when reporting pretest errors, since the job 
of creating TeX Live is distributed to many people. An install error when
installing MacTeX or BasicTeX should be reported to me. An error in a GUI
program should be reported to the authors of the GUI program. An error
in tlmgr should be reported to the TeX Live team. 

However, errors in style files or in TeX binaries should be reported
directly to their authors AND NOT to the TeX Live team, since that team’s
job is to obtain the code from CTAN and package it for TeX Live, but not
to be a central control for the thousands of pieces of TeX Live.

Dick Koch