So many updates on TL2018

Question

I've just fully installed TL2018 few days ago. After that, I updated some packages with tlmgr.

Just now, I observed again within tlmgr that there are so many packages to be updated, more precisely, 95.

So, my question is: are all of them really new version of packages? Is really necessary to set them as new versions? Or am I missing something?

There are at least three updates on CTAN per day. The freeze of TL updates is at least one month. It is needed to prepare the DVD TeX Collection. So we have about 90 packages to update after a new TL was released. That is the default behaviour for years ... — , May 03 '18 at 18:48

score 13 · Accepted Answer · answered May 03 '18 at 18:48

13

During the creation of a new TeX Live version, updates are paused for some time.

Then, after the new release of the TeX Live, the maintainers resume updating as time allows. Thus, the list of updates is quite large at the beginning because of the paused updates. It normalizes after some time to the normal update rate.

answered May 03 '18 at 18:48

Heiko Oberdiek

271,626

Just in case somebody is interested in the numbers for this year: The last package updates for TeX live 2018 before the dev freeze was on 2018-04-09 and updates resumed after the release on 2018-04-28. That leaves a backlog of almost three weeks. The updates have been catching up with that backlog for the last days and should be back to normal now or tomorrow. – moewe May 04 '18 at 08:13

So many updates on TL2018

1 Answers1