Tex Live Utility Update list failed on MacTex 2014 on Yosemite even after updating to latest TLU version 1.19 (solved TLU after reading the Log file - absent subdirectory /usr/local/texlive/2014/tlpkg/backups)

Tex Live Utility Update list failed on MacTex 2014 on Yosemite even after updating to latest TLU version 1.19 (solved TLU after reading the Log file - absent subdirectory /usr/local/texlive/2014/tlpkg/backups)

[David Abernethy]

After updating to Yosemite over Mavericks I tried to update MacTex 2014.  I updated Tex Live Utility to the latest version 1.19 as recommended elsewhere on this list, but found that the list of available packages for update failed to populate.

I think this is a problem with MacTex 2014, specifically the (lack of some) default subdirectories in  /usr/local/texlive/2014/tlpkg/, in particular the subdirectory <backups> needs to be created. 
I eventually discovered this from the informative log file.  

There were two problems:
> Failed executing `/usr/texbin/tlmgr --machine-readable --repository http://mirror.as24220.net/pub/ctan/systems/texlive/tlnet/ update --list --all` (error 1) tlmgr: package repository http://mirror.as24220.net/pub/ctan/systems/texlive/tlnet/
> ===============================================================================
> tlmgr itself needs to be updated.
> Please do this via either
>   tlmgr update --self
> ..

This command would not work until I created /usr/local/texlive/2014/tlpkg/backups

> Then continue with other updates as usual.
> ===============================================================================
> tlmgr: backupdir as set in tlpdb  /usr/local/texlive/2014/tlpkg/backups is not a directory. Exiting.

Then Tex Live Utility worked fine