Anubis challenge on texlive.info pretest mirror breaks TeX Live Utility
Bruno Voisin via tex-live <[email protected]> Fri, 20 Feb 2026 01:16:25 +0100
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.tex.live |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Looking for available updates on https://texlive.info/tlpretest/ with TeX Live Utility (on the Mac), an error is obtained:
2026-02-19 23:45:40 +0000 Notice -[TLMDatabase _downloadDatabaseHead][6879] Checking the repository version. Please be patient.
2026-02-19 23:45:40 +0000 Notice -[TLMDatabase _downloadDatabaseHead][6879] Downloading at least 2048 bytes of tlpdb for a version check…
2026-02-19 23:45:40 +0000 Notice -[TLMDatabase _downloadDatabaseHead][6879] Downloaded 4371 bytes of tlpdb for version check
2026-02-19 23:45:40 +0000 Notice -[TLMDatabase texliveYear][6879] Parsing the database from this repository failed with the following error: parsed up to junk line "<!doctype html><html lang="en"><head><title>Making sure you're not a bot!</title><link rel="stylesheet" href="/.within.website/x/xess/xess.min.css?cachebuster=1.21.3"><meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0"><meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"><style>"
Did not find any packages in TeX Live Database
2026-02-19 23:45:40 +0000 Notice -[TLMDatabase texliveYear][6879] The database can be viewed with a text editor at "/var/folders/1r/dhdtft1s4qgfjwbcpkfhqf5c0000gn/T/0B9CF2F5-FA4E-4B06-AA32-B609160277E3"
2026-02-19 23:45:40 +0000 Notice -[TLMDatabase packageNamed:][6879] *** WARNING *** Requested package 00texlive.config from database without a full download
2026-02-19 23:45:40 +0000 Notice -[TLMDatabase texliveYear][6879] Unable to determine year from 00texlive.config
2026-02-19 23:45:40 +0000 Notice -[TLMMainWindowController _refreshUpdatedPackageListFromLocation:][6879] Not updating package list, since the repository database version could not be determined
2026-02-19 23:45:40 +0000 Notice -[TLMMirrorController _handleVersionCheckNotification:][6879] {
URL = "https://texlive.info/tlpretest/";
year = "-1";
}
2026-02-19 23:45:40 +0000 Notice -[TLMMirrorController _handleVersionCheckNotification:][6879] repository = {
type = 3;
value = "https://texlive.info/tlpretest/";
}
Based on "Making sure you‘re not a bot!", it seems TLU tries to parse https://texlive.info/tlpretest/tlpkg/texlive.tlpdb so as to get the TeX Live year from
name 00texlive.config
[...]
depend release/2026
at the beginning, but gets the Anubis challenge page instead. Hence it fails.
I'm not getting the same with the other servers. For example:
2026-02-20 00:06:11 +0000 Notice -[TLMDatabase _downloadDatabaseHead][6879] Checking the repository version. Please be patient.
2026-02-20 00:06:11 +0000 Notice -[TLMDatabase _downloadDatabaseHead][6879] Downloading at least 2048 bytes of tlpdb for a version check…
2026-02-20 00:06:11 +0000 Notice -[TLMDatabase connection:willSendRequest:redirectResponse:][6879] redirected request to http://ftp.math.utah.edu:80/pub/tlpretest/tlpkg/texlive.tlpdb
2026-02-20 00:06:12 +0000 Notice -[TLMDatabase _downloadDatabaseHead][6879] Downloaded 14306 bytes of tlpdb for version check
2026-02-20 00:06:12 +0000 Notice -[TLMMainWindowController _refreshUpdatedPackageListFromLocation:][6879] Refreshing list of updated packages…
2026-02-20 00:06:12 +0000 Notice -[TLMMirrorController _handleVersionCheckNotification:][6879] {
URL = "http://ftp.math.utah.edu:80/pub/tlpretest/";
year = 2026;
}
2026-02-20 00:06:12 +0000 Notice -[TLMMirrorController _handleVersionCheckNotification:][6879] repository = (null)
2026-02-20 00:06:17 +0000 Notice -[TLMOperation main][6879] Successfully executed `/Library/TeX/texbin/tlmgr --machine-readable --repository https://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tlpretest/ update --list --all`
2026-02-20 00:06:17 +0000 Notice -[TLMOperation main][6879] start load https://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tlpretest/
finish load https://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tlpretest/
This (checking the TL year) must be specific to TLU, not tlmgr, as I'm getting no error with
sudo -H tlmgr -repository https://texlive.info/tlpretest/ update --list
Indeed, based on the math.utah.edu <http://math.utah.edu/> log above, TLU does the year check before calling tlmgr.
Bruno Voisin