[tex-live] Some tests with tlpmgui on win32/linux

[Fleischer]

Hello

I used version 20070122.01 and 20070128.03 of INST CD and did
some tests on several machines with XP SP2 - fresh installs and long
running installations.

The installation with tlpmgui is straight forward and smooth. The
resulting environment is OK and so is the PATH.

This kind of installation is really easy and painless. Thanks very much.
Deinstallation was ok too.

Basic tests on latex, pdflatex,... did not show problems.

Here some further remarks:

- Package wintools was checked for installation but did not install. I
had to add it as package in maintenance mode.

- When installing with TLroot=c:\texlive2007 (the default setting) we
end up with two directories c:\texlive2007 and c:\texmf-local. This does
not look nice to me. The linux version (.\texlive\2007 and
.\texlive\texmf-local) should be realized on windows too.

- Installation ends up with three PATH entries for win32, dviout and gs.
When I checked dviout and gs for installation I had some hope to get
versions of that  programs integrated into /bin/win32 as in TL2003 or so.

- texmf-var/web2c holds now subdirectories and files. This is ugly. But
may be there are some reasons to do so...

- Instead of manually searching for latex.fmt et. al. I used 'kpsewhich
latex.fmt' - but got no answer!

- The situation with $HOME does not please me.
In earlier years the user had to set the environment variable home to
whatever he wants and had to build some private tree like
texmf/tex/latex/myproject. That was all.
The absense of the environment variable HOME did not really hurt.
The way to fill the environment variable was described in texlive doc.

Now this is no longer possible as texmf.cnf does no longer integrate
TEXMFHOME into TEXMF and/or SYSTEXMF.
Update from 20070128.03: TEXMFHOME is back and part of TEXMF, but mapped
to TEXMFLOCAL. Now it is more easy to explain how to handle a privat
tree. But this needs editing texmf.cnf, so:

- tlpmgui should allow editing texmf.cnf

- tlpmgui in maintenance mode does not show which TL-installation it
will try to modify. I expect that the environment variable TLroot is
used to find TL on the disk. But I am not sure.
With linux I had to move the old binaries from TL2005 out of the PATH to
get the installation mode. Otherwise tlpmgui would come up in
maintenance mode and tries to handle my TL2005.
On a Opensuse box tlpmgui tries to maintain the original tetex installation.

Thank you for TeXLive

Wolfgang Fleischer