[tex-live] texlive 8

[Sebastian Rahtz]

On Wed, 2003-02-05 at 14:46, Karl Berry wrote:
>     IFFFFFFF we had a portable installation system,
>     it would all be OK! but we dont. 
> 
> Sure we do.  install-cd.sh.  (Windows is a completely separate case
> anyway.)

but if Windows isn't treated the same way, we are no further forward.
we can't have *two* sets of packages.

>     Yes, we have all had this conversation a thousand times, 
> 
> We have?  Not on the list I guess, or maybe I wasn't paying attention.

the latter, I suspect :-} honest, it keeps coming up.

> Sorry, I don't understand the problem.  Users don't need to know or care
> what install-cd.sh uses or how the cd is organized. 

but they do these days expect a better interface than the clunky
shell script. its a work of genius from Thomas in many ways,
but it shows its ancestry


> (Oh, and bzip2 should be used for the actual compression, it is better
> than anything else.)

IF Fabrice was able to switch his setup program to read foo.tar.bz2
from CD instead of reading foo.tpm and getting a list of files,
then the install-sh.cf program could do the same. so the CD
would contain

 tpm/*
 packages/*

and documentation.

downsides:

 * we lose the use Fabrice describes of a demo CD (but we could
   have the DVD for that)
 * the end user has to have bzip2 under Unix (or we ship it)
 * you cant browse the CD
 * it would better to have the metadata in the package file (like rpm 
   or deb)
 * it would break our existing system, and so mean more testing

the good news is that I could get this working from the existing
install-cd.sh in a few hours.

so
 a) do people want this?
 b) Fabrice, how much would would it be to switch your setup
    to read a bzip'ed tar file instead of a list of files?
-- 
Sebastian Rahtz      OUCS Information Manager
13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN. Phone +44 1865 283431