[tex-live] TexLive 2015 DVD comments

Peter Wilson herries.press at earthlink.net
Wed Sep 2 21:45:18 CEST 2015


First of all I am always amazed and grateful to all of you who put 
together the TeX DVD. Thank you.

But (and after that you knew that there would be a But), I have a couple 
of suggestions. First some background. I well remember how excited we 
were in my computer group to get a 256k hard drive (about the size of a 
fridge and freezer). Since then I have travelled across many computer 
systems. My present one is a Windows PC (can you get any other?) where I 
run Ubunto under Windows (don't ask, it's a long, painful, and 
half-forgotten story).

The bottom line is that in today's world I am woefully short of disc 
space, being limited to under 30G for my use.

I had TexLive 2014 installed with 1.2 G free space left. I wanted to 
install TexLive 2015 from the latest DVD but the installation soon 
stopped through, I presume, lack of space. Eventually after deleting 
much stuff (much of which I had used, even if only occasionaly)
I freed up 4.9G. At that point I could install TexLive 2015, which on my 
machine required 3.6G. I was installing via a terminal window which shut 
itself down when it decided that it had done enough. Then there was the 
tlmgr upgrade of stuff from 2014 to 2015 which, in my case, required 
another 0.25G.

I think that it would be very useful if the instructions that came with 
the TexLive DVD gave an indication of the hard-disc space requirements, 
mainly for TexLive itself but also for possible tlmgr updates from an 
earlier to a later version.

It would have helped me if there had been some indication in the 
documentation that the terminal window would close by itself so that 
there was no chance of seeing what had happened.

I know that I could have freed up the necessary space by deleting my 
2014 TexLive installation but I wasn't going to do that until I had a 
new working up-to-date version.

I'm still very appreciative of all the work that has gone into TexLive 2015.

Peter W.


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