[tex-live] TL2017's tlpkg/installer/wget/wget.x86_64-darwin: HTTPS support not compiled in.

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2018-01-31 at 13:17:12 +0000, Philip Taylor (RHUoL) wrote:

 > George N. White III wrote:
 > 
 >     [...]  it is not unreasonable to simple state
 >     that a suitable downloader must be provided before attempting to
 >     run the installer.  
 > 
 > I am sorry, George, I completely disagree.  Someone seeking to
 > install TeX Live can reasonably be assumed to know a little about
 > computer typesetting and a little about using the operating system
 > of his/her choice; there is no a priori evidence that he or she
 > knows anything more.  Therefore, to expect such a user to locate,
 > download and install "a suitable downloader" is (IMHO) completelu
 > unreasonable.  A suitable downloader should form an integral part
 > of the TeX Live installer, and automatically come therewith.

TeX Live was supposed to always work out-of-the-box from the very
beginning and there are no intentions to change this behaviour,
at least not deliberately.   

On Unix I don't expect any problems.  If a particular program isn't
found, a user can deduce from the error message which package is
missing and use the package manager in order to download and install
the package within a few seconds.

On Windows the situation is worse.  The error message says which
program is missing.  The user then has to determine the location of
the package in the internet, download it, install it, ...
This is absolutely inacceptable, of course.

But I have one very important question:

Does getnonfreefonts still work on Windows?

A few years ago a concerned user asked me to make downloading the
remote part of the script more secure.  I then replaced http://tug.org
by https://tug.org in order to activate SSL encryption.

On Windows, getnonfreefonts entirely depends on the wget binary
shipped with TeX Live.  Nobody complained so far, hence I assume that
tlpkg/installer/wget/wget.exe supports HTTPS already.

If somebody can confirm that getnonfreefonts works on Windows at all,
we can leave the Windows part of TeX Live as it is and save a lot of
time.

Download

  https://www.tug.org/fonts/getnonfreefonts/install-getnonfreefonts

to an arbitrary directory, move into this directory, run

  texlua install-getnonfreefonts

and then execute

  getnonfreefonts --sys --lsfonts

Does getnonfreefonts work on Windows?

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha                            Phone: +49-511-3373112
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