Bug with the latest texlive installer on Windows

rhn.grg at gmail.com rhn.grg at gmail.com
Fri Jun 28 01:17:03 CEST 2019


Hi,

I noticed this issue with the latest texlive GUI installer on a Windows 10
PC. It seems like the texlive installer doesn't handle spaces in program
paths correctly. It works only after copying the texlive install directory
(install-tl-20190627) to a path that doesn't have spaces.

Here are the outputs when trying to run from two different directories.

1. Directory with spaces in the path.

$ c:\New folder\install-tl-20190627>install-tl-windows.bat

This exits with the following error message popout.

    Error starting Perl backend.
    Level 1: main_prog
    Level 2: err_exit {Error starting Perl backend}

2. Directory with no spaces in the path.

$ c:\install-tl-20190627>install-tl-windows.bat

(This runs successfully.)

I did some further debugging, which led me to the following source of
error. It seems like the problematic lines are in
tlpkg/installer/install-tl-gui.tcl (lines: 1853 - 1857).

 ...
1852   # start install-tl-[tcl] via a pipe.
1853   set cmd [list "|${::perlbin}" "${::instroot}/install-tl" \
1854                "-from_ext_gui" {*}$::argv 2>@1]
1855   show_time "opening pipe"
1856   if [catch {open $cmd r+} ::inst] {
1857     err_exit "Error starting Perl backend"
1858   }
 ...

I'm not that familiar with Tcl/Tk, but perhaps the paths to $perlbin and to
$install-tl need to be sanitized/quoted in line 1853? I tried adding the
quotes (using \"), but it didn't work for me; perhaps, someone more
familiar with Tcl/Tk can fix this.

Thanks,
Rohan
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