TLCockpit v0.8

Today I released v0.8 of TLCockpit, the GUI front-end for the TeX Live Manager tlmgr. I spent the winter holidays in updating and polishing, but also in helping me debug problems that users have reported. Hopefully the new version works better for all.

If you are looking for a general introduction to TLCockpit, please see the blog introducing it. Here I only want to introduce the changes made since the last release:

  • add debug facility: It is now possible to pass -d for debugging to tlcockpit, activating debugging. There is also -dd for more verbose debugging.
  • select mirror facility: The edit screen for the repository setting now allows selecting from the current list of mirrors, see the following screenshot:
  • initial loading speedup: Till now we used to parse the json output of tlmgr, which included everything the whole database contains. We now load the initial minimal information via info --data and load additional data when details for a package is shown on demand. This should especially make a difference on systems without a compiled json Perl library available.
  • fixed self update: In the previous version, updating the TeX Live Manager itself was not properly working – it was updated but the application itself became unresponsive afterwards. This is hopefully fixed (although this is really tricky).
  • status indicator: The status indicator has moved from the menu bar (where it was somehow a stranger) to below the package listing, and now also includes the currently running command, see screenshot after the next item.
  • nice spinner: Only an eye-candy, but I added a rotating spinner while loading the database, updates, backups, or doing postactions. See the attached screenshot, which also shows the new location of the status indicator and the additional information provided.

I hope that this version is more reliable, stable, and easier to use. As usual, please use the issue page of the github project to report problems.

TeX Live should contain the new version starting from tomorrow.

Enjoy.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>