failed "trying to unwind"

[Karl Berry]

    Could there be an general option "never remove forcibly" or
    "always reinstall forcibly"? 

There could be. The problem is that occasionally packages are renamed,
which amounts to removal of the old package and addition of the new one,
which will end in a bad situation if the removal isn't done.

That doesn't happen often, though. Clearly the unanticipated removal of
perfectly-fine packages is a worse and more common outcome on Windows.

I wonder if it's possible to somehow override the fail-if-a-file-is-open
behavior in our internal tar used on Windows (Master/source/tar-w32.*).
Or at least detect it. That's the fundamental source of the problem.

    Hm. I'm not sure how to extract from the backup container so that it
    tries to overwrite the doc file from the texmf-dist folder. 

I believe:

cd c:/.../2022  # the directory containing texmf-dist, tlpkg, etc.
xz -dcf < tlpkg/backups/whatever.r*.tar.xz | tar -xf -

That is, the tar file unpacks into the Master tree. As you probably
already know, but just in case, you can use tar tf - to see the contents
of the tar after uncompressing.

If you don't have xz in your path, you can use the one in
./tlpkg/installer/xz/xz.exe.

    In any case all tar versions I could find in windows and in texlive
    don't know a --warning option.

It's only in GNU tar :(.  -k