[tex-live] Problems with updating TeXLive in Windows

[George N. White III]

On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 6:16 PM, John Was <john.was at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> [...]
> tlmgr update bin-texlive texlive.infra
>
> the routine fails, producing the following error message on screen:
>
>
> Cannot read any package from
> http://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet/2008/tlpkg/texlive.tlpdb, seems
> not to be a TLPDB! Cannot load Tex Live database from
> http://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet/2008
>  at c:/program Files/texlive/2008/texmf/scripts/texlive/tlmgr.pl line 616

I use "<drive>:/texlive/2008" -- many TeX tools have problems with
spaces in paths, so even if most things work, there is still a chance
that some obscure tool will break (and Murphy says it will happen 5
minutes before some critical deadline).

Some of your problems may be also due to using an older version of the
installer.

>From http://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet/2008 you can download
the current installer, e.g.,

update-tlmgr-r11613.exe

> [...]
> Thus, it seems that currently there is no reliable way to update the
> installation on a Windows XP machine - though no doubt some packages could
> be updated manually without doing damage, simply by replacing an older
> version of the relevant files with an updated one.  But this is clearly not
> very satisfactory.

It has been working  for me, but I have a local mirror or the
tlnet/2008 directory
that gets updated each night, so I avoid network-related glitches.   I had many
failures trying to install from CTAN via internet.

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia