Trouble with Travis-CI and Tinytex

[jtbayly]

I'm having trouble building my books on Travis, as of yesterday. I think this coincides and is caused by an update to TexLive.

In my build script, I was already having problems a month or so ago with the tlmgr command being hardcoded to a mirror hosted by Purdue which is no longer there, so in my build script I had to add the following line to get a proper current mirror:

tlmgr option repository ctan

Now the builds started failing again, and the error said in part...

tlmgr itself needs to be updated.
Please do this via either
tlmgr update --self

So I added the update command as well.

Now I've got another error: The gpg signature does not match.

tlmgr option repository ctan
962tlmgr: setting default package repository to http://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet
963tlmgr update --self
964/home/travis/texlive/bin/x86_64-linux/tlmgr: signature verification error of /tmp/XefdwwLBLX/FCN0nkEPS7 from https://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet/tlpkg/texlive.tlpdb: cryptographic signature verification of
965  /tmp/XefdwwLBLX/d3pFGr2Qa1
966against
967  https://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet/tlpkg/texlive.tlpdb.sha512.asc
968failed. Output was
969gpg: Signature made Mon Apr 19 23:53:17 2021 UTC using RSA key ID 19438C70
970gpg: BAD signature from "TeX Live Distribution <tex-live@tug.org>"
971
972Please report to texlive@tug.org

I did report it to that email address, but doing a quick search makes me think this is a problem with R in Travis-CI:

tlmgr: unexpected return value from verify_checksum: -5

Going back earlier in the logs to the "Installing R" section, there are these lines:

$ curl -fLo /tmp/texlive.tar.gz https://github.com/jimhester/ubuntu-bin/releases/download/latest/texlive.tar.gz
7451.69s$ tar xzf /tmp/texlive.tar.gz -C ~
746$ export PATH=${TRAVIS_HOME}/texlive/bin/x86_64-linux:$PATH
747375.93s$ tlmgr update --self
748No connection to the internet.
749Unable to download the checksum of the remote TeX Live database,
750but found a local copy so using that.
751
752You may want to try specifying an explicit or different CTAN mirror;
753see the information and examples for the -repository option at
754http://tug.org/texlive/doc/install-tl.html
755(or in the output of install-tl --help).
756
757tlmgr: package repository http://ftp.math.purdue.edu/mirrors/ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet (not verified: unknown)
758tlmgr: saving backups to /home/travis/texlive/tlpkg/backups
759tlmgr: no self-updates for tlmgr available.

Not only has the jimhester texlive repo that this is relying on not been updated since 2016, but the tlmgr update is failing because its mirror disappeared. Furthermore, the key used to sign the packages possibly expired, causing even more problems.

Ultimately, I think this is just a super outdated version of texlive that should be fixed in the R build in Travis-CI. Am I mistaken?

[cderv]

I don't know about the isntalled texlive on CI but you could install TinyTeX directly and not use the texlive installation already there I think

You can install either using R with tinytex::install_tinytex() or directly on Linux using the install script
See Doc at TinyTeX - A lightweight, cross-platform, portable, and easy-to-maintain LaTeX distribution based on TeX Live - Yihui Xie | 谢益辉

Maybe this could fix your issue with Travis.

[jtbayly]

Thank you. This was just the suggestion I needed. I was able to solve the problem by specifying that Latex not be installed by Travis (added “latex: false” in my build YAML), and then manually installing it like you suggested.

This had the added benefit of cutting over 6 minutes off my build time, which was another recent development. It's clear to me now that the Latex install has been gradually failing for a couple of months, and now it no longer works. I've filed a bug report to Travis-CI and their volunteer maintainers of the R language VMs over here.