[tex-live] TeXLive-CD/DVD (Installation)

Oliver Bandel oliver at first.in-berlin.de
Wed May 23 02:37:55 CEST 2007


On Wed, May 23, 2007 at 12:45:40AM +0100, Edd Barrett wrote:
> On 22/05/07, Reinhard Kotucha <reinhard.kotucha at web.de> wrote:
> >We need, at least for UNIX, an installer which works on all platforms.
> >Currently it is a shell script which uses some autoconf magic for
> >platform detection (config.guess).  The shell script we have now is
> >quite fine.  I'm very happy with it and for UNIX it is definitely the
> >best solution.
> 
> Hi there,
> 
> I have do disagree. But allow me to justify myself.
> 
> There are too many shells with different syntax. Yes, your installer
> works great on systems with bash, mostly linux i suppose. The
> installer does not work on my platform of choice. I suspect it is the
> shell (ksh), but it could be the tar implementation (not gtar). Either
> way shell commands are a bad way to go in my opinion, as they differ
> between platfroms, and windows has no good shell unless cygwin is
> installed (which is too much to ask for a texlive install I think).
> Why not use library calls from say python? This gaurantee's platform
> independancy surely?
> 


reading this is strange...

shells were invented to have a flexible system....

When reading this text one is tempted to prefer binaries,
specialized for the target platform in general.

Isn't bash installed on most systems?

Should we go back and use sh instead?

Ciao,
  Oliver


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