tlmgr --self

[Karl Berry]

Hi Jim,

    Q: why is --self not the default?  Are there any/many situations where
    you would not want the self-update to happen?

I don't know of any specific situation where you wouldn't want to do
--self, if you're doing daily updates anyway. But I guess we felt it was
better for the user to explicitly specify this, i.e., to be able to
postpone it if timing was bad for an infrastructure update.

What I do myself is, essentially,
repo="--repository ctan"  # or whatever
tlmgr $repo update --self && tlmgr $repo update --all

since I want to know soonest if an update breaks something :). --best, karl.