Any effort towards a rolling release of TeX Live?

How can you roll an update to luatex that undefines many primitives, renames many primitives and has incompatible changes to the main lua node and callback interfaces?

It takes months of contacting and pre-warning package authors to make changes required. Even then not all done by time TL2016 goes live.

Not to mention testing building and packaging on all engines, not just luatex.


A few answers:

  • since about 5 years we had the option for upgrading installations, so there have been rolling releases. Don't mix it up with the freeze before DVD production, as I laid out in the answer to your other question
  • this year the infrastructure has changed in incompatible way, in particular the checksum method was updated. This means that older tlmgr cannot update to newer versions.
  • that all said, you can still update using the tlmgr-update-latest release method, so again, this year we do have a rolling release, if you disregard the freeze period prior to DVD production.