[tex-live] tl-install needs too much disk space

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2012-07-30 at 16:24:34 +0200, Lars Madsen wrote:

 > Norbert Preining wrote, On 2012-07-12 11:22:
 > > On Mi, 13 Jun 2012, Leo Liu wrote:
 > >> When I installed TeX Live 2012 pretest on Windows, I noticed that it
 > >> costs too much disk space for compressed packages. The achieves in
 > >> texlive/temp/*.xz are not deleted in time.
 > > 
 > > 
 > > That is on purpose. In case the installation breaks at some point,
 > > a simple restart with the same target director will *re-use* 
 > > all the already downloaded packages.
 > > 
 > > So we keep them on purpose, they will be removed at the end of
 > > the installation.
 > > 
 > > I think nowadays with disk space normally abundant 1.5 or so extra G
 > > is not so much pain?!?
 > > 
 > >> Would it be changed? Thanks.
 > > 
 > > I don't think that changing this default for the rare case that someone
 > > is so low on disk space pays of the disadvantage to maybe be
 > > required to re-download all the packages ...
 > > 
 > > But I guess we are open for suggestions.
 > > 
 > > Best wishes
 > 
 > then at least the installer should mention this

The information how large the .tar.xz files are is not available ATM.

 > I just ran into this as well. User has 4Gb left on his HD, installer 
 > says TL will need 3Gb, but we ran out of space during the installation.
 > 
 > would it be possible to add an extra option to add the temp files in a 
 > separate folder (on a separate partition, say)

This might not be sufficient if you only have access to one partition
with limited size on a particular machine.  I encounterd this problem
when installing TeX Live on a server with quotas.  On my local machine
there was enough space but it wasn't accessible because the only way
to access the server was via ssh.

Norbert, what about this:
Whenever a package is installed successfully, the .tar.xz file is
replaced by an empty file with the same name, but the .tar.xz
extension removed.  This way the installer/updater can determine which
packages can be skipped when an aborted download is resumed.  In this
case the extra space needed is exaxtly the size of the largest package.

Is something like this feasable?

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha                                      Phone: +49-511-3373112
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