[tex-live] TeX live versus inst

SaGS sags5495 at hotmail.com
Thu Jan 12 17:47:00 CET 2006


Hello all,

I have a small question about the difference in contents 
between the "live" DVD and "inst" CD versions of TeX Live 2005.

Looking at http://www.tug.org/texlive/, I understand there 
are 2 differences between the 2:

[PACK] The TeX Live 2005 "live" DVD contains unpacked files,
       while files on the CD are compressed,
and also
[XTRA] The "live" DVD contains extra stuff (proTeXt, MacTeX 
       and a snapshot of CTAN).

I expect the extra material in [XTRA] adds up to a substantial 
amount of data.

Now, looking at http://www.tug.org/ftp/texlive/Images/ I notice:

texlive2005-inst-20051102.iso      02-Nov-2005 01:33   682M
texlive2005-live-20051102.iso      02-Nov-2005 01:11  1293M

DVD image size = 2 x the CD; fine, uncompressed and extra material.

But:

texlive2005-inst-20051102.iso.bz2  27-Nov-2005 02:22   653M
texlive2005-live-20051102.iso.bz2  27-Nov-2005 02:37   587M

After compression, the DVD image becomes smaller than the CD! 
I believe that compressing the image gives better results than 
compressing each file individually, maybe BZ2 offers better 
compression than TAR.GZ/ZIP, but where does the (lots of) [XTRA] 
stuff go? And if after compressing everything, it fits in less 
than 650M, why would be anything left off the CD?

So my question: is there any difference between the 2 
in what files/ directories are included, or it's just the 
compression?


Thanks in advance for any clarification,
Gh Savulescu



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