Two Upcoming Changes in TinyTeX and tinytex

Recently I received an email from CRAN, from which I learned about an accident
related to TinyTeX . CRAN requested me to make a change to avoid
such accidents in the future, and I’d like to mention this change and also
announce another upcoming change in this post.

Preventing accidental installation of TinyTeX

For the sake of convenience, the R function tinytex::install_tinytex() would
not ask for user’s confirmation before installing TinyTeX. I assume that users
know what they are doing when calling this function, just like calling
install.packages() would install R packages without confirmation. I knew this
could be problematic since the beginning, because users might call this function
inadvertently, and there is not a straightforward way to prevent the
installation.

I have enjoyed more than four years’ peace… until someone called this function
somewhere in his/her package (presumably inadvertently since this is definitely
against the CRAN policy), which installed TinyTeX on CRAN’s machines. What a
horror story!

In the next version of the R package tinytex , install_tinytex() will
prevent the automatic installation in the following two cases:

1. The environment variable TINYTEX_PREVENT_INSTALL is set to true . This
   gives the sysadmin a way to disable the installation altogether, and
   install_tinytex() will simply throw an error.
2. Another LaTeX distribution is detected. In this case, if the R session is
   interactive() , users will be asked if they want to continue the
   installation anyway; if the R session is not interactive,
   install_tinytex() will throw an error telling users that if they are sure
   they want to install TinyTeX anyway, they can use
   tinytex::install_tinytex(force = TRUE) .

I guess this change should not affect too many people, but it will affect
existing users who install TinyTeX via install_tinytex() in a non-interactive
R session (eg, via the command Rscript -e 'tinytex::install_tinytex() ) when
there already exists a LaTeX distribution in the system. You would have to use
the argument force = TRUE . That may be a minor inconvenience, but the gain is
that there should be much fewer accidents like the one I mentioned above.

If you want to check if this change affects you, you may install the dev version
of tinytex now:

 remotes::install_github('yihui/tinytex')

And see what happens to tinytex::install_tinytex() .

If you have any feedback on this change, please feel free to let me know.
Currently, I plan to submit the new version to CRAN next week.

Migrating to the rstudio org on Github

We plan to migrate the two Github repositories,
https://github.com/yihui/tinytex and
https://github.com/yihui/tinytex-releases to the rstudio organization next
week (May 16, 2022). That is, they will become
https://github.com/rstudio/tinytex and
https://github.com/rstudio/tinytex-releases , respectively. We hoped to migrate
the two repositories from my personal account to rstudio to make it safer to
build and install TinyTeX, and also easier to manage future contributions to
this project.

In theory, this should not affect anyone, because Github will automatically
redirect the old links to the new ones, including links to the precompiled
TinyTeX binaries in Github Releases. Anyway, I want to announce this in advance
so that you can be better prepared. If you run into any problems with installing
TinyTeX next week, please do us a favor file a
report immediately. Thanks!

This article is reprinted from: https://yihui.org/en/2022/05/tinytex-changes/
This site is for inclusion only, and the copyright belongs to the original author.