[tex-live] The suggestions (from tex-d-l) (Re: Comment on Re: TeXLive-CD/DVD (Installation))

George N. White III gnwiii at gmail.com
Thu May 24 19:47:20 CEST 2007


On 5/23/07, Sebastian Rahtz <sebastian.rahtz at oucs.ox.ac.uk> wrote:

> I do wonder whether all this is worth the effort. I know
> 4 hours is horribly slow, but you only do it once a year.
> Of course, if its easy to rewrite the install scripts
> to be more efficient, that's great, but not if it
> takes weeks of work.

It isn't clear to me that "live" is compatible with rapid install.
I started a Windows install an hour ago using Msys with
install-tl.sh and it just started copying (it actually found
msys' tar to be acceptable).  There is no indication of any
problem with the disk, so people who report lots of drive
noise may have bad media or other hardware problems.
The tar copy is not going to be fast as the drive light is
off quite a bit of the time.

So far there were only a few glitches with Msys (remembering that
the jobs is still running):

1.  Msys lacks "more", so I had to "cp less.exe more.exe"
2.  Msys lacks "clear"
3.  you have to know that /c/texlive is the Msys name for C:\TeXLive

Many Windows users expect to reinstall applications early
and often. Some applications have conflicts, so SOP is to
install app A until you need app B, then uninstall A and install B.
When you have a problem the first thing Windows support people
tell you is "redo from start".   This attitude is often carried over
to *X, so I suspect many linux users also expect to install often.

For linux there are users who install new distros every few
months (e.g., because they maintain some app that needs
to be ported to the most recent gnome/kde before 1000's
of users start reporting bugs).

> Someone doing it for many machines would surely
> copy from the DVD first? And anyone in a system
> capacity serving many users would surely be
> using some sort of packaging system? or am
> I being naive?

The target for DVD installs is the user group member who
has limited internet bandwidth and gets the live DVD
in the mail.

Disk space is cheap.  Maybe the best compromise is to
make install-tl copy selected binary dirs along with
the full texmf trees.  This would save the hour needed to
construct the file lists, and the copies should be much
faster.

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia


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