[tex-live] Solution to the file locking problem during update - take 2

Norbert Preining preining at logic.at
Thu Jan 15 13:21:17 CET 2009


Hi Tomek,

On Do, 15 Jan 2009, T T wrote:
> tried it with several interpreters (cmd, perl, lua) and all of them
> pass open file handles onto a spawned child process and thus prevent

Yes, that is W32 inherent and cannot be changed. We tried that already.

> My second attempt follows the above logic. I modified the wrapper
> script tlmgr.bat so that it watches for updater.bat script. If it
> exists then it will be executed after tlmgr.pl is done. This seems to
> work in my limited testing but not without problems.

Interessing approach.

> So the next step would be to modify tlmgr.pl but before I will go with
> this any further I would like to know the following:

What would be needed for that change? I ask because we have a major
rewrite of tlmgr in the queue already, but we didn't push it, nor to
tlcritical (and much less to normal distribution). Still this is where
we are going. No big changes, most stuff from current tpmgr.pl remains.
Still, patching the current tlmgr.pl is not a good idea.

> 1) Are developers OK with those changes?

Of course.

> 2) How would you prefer to handle dry-run option? My take on it would
> be to construct updater.bat in memory and then print it to stdout if
> dry-run otherwise write to file (but this means more changes to
> tlmgr.pl - subroutines (open,add,close)_w32_updater would have to be
> modified, as well as some surrounding code).

In dry-run mode we can just simply ignore printing it, no? That would
not change much.

> 3) How can I test it on a fresh install that is up to date?

Simply, edit the texlive.tlpdb by hand and reduce the revision lines of
some packages, so then it will believe that updates are available.

> 4) Where should I send the modified files?

To the list, or to me.

> PS. Here's the modified version of tlmgr.bat

Word wrapped, please attach files, not include them. Your MUA
word-wrapped the .bat file.

Can you please send me a full set of changed files (which .bat files,
and probably changes to tlmgr.pl, too) so that I take a look and check
the code. Thanks.

And, sorry, again, thanks a lot for taking interest in it!!!!

Best wishes

Norbert

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Dr. Norbert Preining <preining at logic.at>        Vienna University of Technology
Debian Developer <preining at debian.org>                         Debian TeX Group
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