[tex-live] TeX Live 2008 testing - problems downloading

Reinhard Kotucha reinhard.kotucha at web.de
Fri Jul 4 21:38:04 CEST 2008


Philip TAYLOR (Ret'd) writes:
 > Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
 > [...]
 > 
 > > The second approach should work as well, but on Windows files
 > > with a leading dot in their name are not hidden.
 > 
 > Why would you want to /hide/ .luatex ?  

Hi Phil,
people don't want to see all the config files all the time.

On Unix, the command 'ls' doesn't display files with a leading dot in
their names by default.  On Windows such files are put into %APPDATA%.

The effect is the same:

  ls --all $HOME  (Unix)
  dir %APPDATA%   (Windows)

shows all the "hidden" files.  Maybe the word "hidden" confused you
because there is an attribute in the Windows file system which allows
you to hide files.  But this is not what I meant.  The idea is to
avoid to annoy people, not to make the files invisible.

 > How could a normal user clear the cache if he/she can't even see
 > that it exists ?!

Such a cache is quite similar to an ls-R file.  It's maintained by
tools and it shouldn't be necessary that users are aware about all the
internals.  The short answer to your question is: RTFM instead of
reverse-engineer things.

 > It's bad enough Microsoft hiding file extensions by default; hiding
 > the files themselves is the sort of thing a rootkit does !

I think it's clear now what I meant with "hidden".  What a rootkit
does is something completely different.  Rootkits make files
invisible.  That's not what we want.

Regards,
  Reinhard


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