[tex-live] TL installer doing things without permission :-(

[Siep Kroonenberg]

On Thu, Aug 07, 2008 at 11:54:17PM +0200, Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard wrote:
> Norbert Preining scripsit (07.08.2008 23:00)
> 
> Maybe it's not to late to add something about the PATH in the welcome message
> for windows (since there's already sthg about it on Unix)?

Not quite the same, but now the installer will give a warning under
Windows if there already is a TeX found, and give the user a
chance to bail out. At the moment this is done by the batchfile, but
this will probably be replaced with something more polished.

Now about asking users what the installer should and shouldn't do:

The Windows users I deal with are smart enough in their own field,
but most of them have very little notion of the system they work on.
If they are well-organized then they know their way around among
their own documents, but the rest of their system is just a black
box. So I prefer not to even mention a search path. The people who
care and understand will have no trouble dealing with it on their
own.

That being said, browsing the Ubuntu forums I see a lot of new users
who would probably panick at the welcome message advising them to
add TeX to their PATH.

Another point: asking questions via a gui is a lot of work: both as
to programming and as to designing. This time around, we have done a
major overhaul of the infrastructure. Next time, we can pay more
attention to the interface, including asking a few more questions.

-- 
Siep Kroonenberg