[tex-live] TeX Live on usb drive

George N. White III gnwiii at gmail.com
Thu Mar 19 18:33:31 CET 2009


On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 1:50 PM, Robin Fairbairns
<Robin.Fairbairns at cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:

> Philip TAYLOR <Philip-and-LeKhanh at Royal-Tunbridge-Wells.Org> wrote:
>
>> Ignoring Robin's petulant little outburst (below),
>
> ha bloody ha ha.
>
> my department pays for data transferred out of tex.ac.uk; i can't afford
> to encourage everyone in the world who can't drive wget to flock to my
> site, or my site will be shut down in perpetuity.
>
> i have suppressed the inappropriate use of on-the-fly compression for
> the texlive directories.

I think some zip implementations will store files in "raw" form if the
compressed version isn't smaller.    In any case, the real issue is to
find a reliable way for users to get a complete copy, and for many of
us, the usual mirroring by individual files is not straightforward.   Maybe
and on-the-fly tar (e.g., without compression) would be better.

> sure, help users who need help, but don't expect backdoors that you've
> discovered to remain open.
>
> i guess i ought, when i've read the appropriate documentation, to switch
> off dynamic archiving altogether.

It is a bit of a pain when different CTAN sites have different capabilities --
you end up with user A advising user B to do something that works for
the mirror site used by A but not the one used by B.

The other issue is more intelligent redirection to steer users away from
sites that have higher usage costs.   I think most people do try to follow
the advice to use non-root sites, but it does make sense for root
sites to run only the features used by non-root mirrors.

It might be interesting to look at the ratio between the bytes served to
CTAN non-root mirrors and the bytes served to users.

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


More information about the tex-live mailing list