[tex-live] Bugs in install-tl for win32

Reinhard Kotucha reinhard.kotucha at web.de
Sun Jun 29 01:51:48 CEST 2008


Norbert Preining writes:

 > > and successfully generated. The only non-routine messages were
 > > warnings from tar:
 > >   "Unrecognized file type '2', extracting as ordinary file".
 > 
 > That is true, and unfortunately we can probably not do anything against
 > it. THat are symbolic links and they are extracted on unixish systems
 > correctly, and on win32, since it does not support symbolic links, as
 > copies. That is the correct behaviour.
 > 
 > Options to deal with that would be:
 > - replace all sysmbolic links with copies 
 >   seems to be a good idea since we are not talking about huge amount
 >   of files.
 >   Karl: What about when we build the .tar.lzma that we somehow try to
 >   follow symlinks for all but files under bin/? Files under bin should
 >   remain symlinks, otherwise loads of things will probably break.

Hi Norbert,

  find texmf -type l

found 22 symlinks in the texmf/doc/man/man1 directory.  Are these the
only culprits or are there other ones?

They are actually avoidable if a groff macro is used instead.  This
macro had been used by getnonfreefonts-sys.1 for three years now and
it obviously works reliably:

$ cat texmf/doc/man/man1/getnonfreefonts-sys.1
.so man1/getnonfreefonts.1

Emacs can display the manpage in woman mode (woman means "without man").
That means that Emacs understands the ".so" macro even on Windows when
man and *roff aren't present.

Disadvantage:  Though a symlink is only an entry in an inode, a
               regular file requires a data block.

Advantage:     Nothing else has to be changed.

And a data block which contains only a few bytes of text and the rest
of the data block is filled up with zero-bytes can be compressed as
efficiently as a symlink.  

I assume that the changes have to be done in the Build tree.

Karl, what do you think?  I can try to create and upload the needed
files.  This will have no effect before the Makefiles are adapted.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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