[tex-live] Bugs in install-tl for win32

Norbert Preining preining at logic.at
Sat Jun 28 12:56:28 CEST 2008


Hi Dan, hi all,

here some responses, but I cannot treat all of them, and most important,
I am leaving for one week mountaineering, so I will not be able to work
on anything during this time.

On Fr, 27 Jun 2008, Dan Luecking wrote:
> [Previously I had determined that one needs to find a working
>  mirror and use the -url option to select that mirror. I had also

I have an idea how to settle on one mirror during installation, but it
needs implementation and debug ...

> and successfully generated. The only non-routine messages were
> warnings from tar:
>   "Unrecognized file type '2', extracting as ordinary file".

That is true, and unfortunately we can probably not do anything against
it. THat are symbolic links and they are extracted on unixish systems
correctly, and on win32, since it does not support symbolic links, as
copies. That is the correct behaviour.

Options to deal with that would be:
- replace all sysmbolic links with copies 
  seems to be a good idea since we are not talking about huge amount
  of files.
  Karl: What about when we build the .tar.lzma that we somehow try to
  follow symlinks for all but files under bin/? Files under bin should
  remain symlinks, otherwise loads of things will probably break.

- other option would be to filter the stderr messages and issue only
  those not matching some known good ones ...
  The problem with that is that capturing of stdout/stderr on win32
  is as close to impossible as possible. It is just deadly horrible.

> - There was this serious bug: Registry entries are changed!!!
>   I did not appreciate the fact that the rather inadequate psv
>   program was substituted for gsview as the default for opening
>   PostScript files. This should never be done without requesting

Several points here:
- TeX Live cannot ship gsview, it is non-free
- psv is definitely more advanced than gsview (and much faster)
- it is right that psv should NOT overwrite already existing 
  file associations

Siep: Is it possible to change the code in TLWinGoo so that
- (add) if there is already an association just leave it untouched
- (remove) if there is a file association with a different program
  leave it untouched

> - There is a second serious bug: Uninstalling TeXLive did not undo
>   those registry changes. I took me quite some effort to determine
>   how to change them back.

I guess you meant that it didn'r re-associate gsview with ps files. THat
is true. But it should have removed the association of psv with
postscript files?

Siep: Does the remove routine remove also the *definition* of postscript
files (so the association of .ps with PostScript Files)? That we
shouldn't remove at all.

> Finally, for no apparent reason, install-tl.bat has completely
> ceased to work. There is a complaint of uninitialized value at
> line 1388 of TLutils.pm, followed by much more. I will retry

That is fixed. But there is a different bug at the end of the
installation.

Do you still have a WORKING .zip file? If yes it would be great if you
could send me that per email.

I have no idea because nothing has changed in this area since ages, but
suddenly it does not load Popup.al while it was doing that.
On Unix it loads without problems, only on win32 not.

So I am sorry for the current status. The problems with the mirror is
something painful, and I don't know what to do against it. Rewriting the
installer that the installation can be resumed is not possible for this
year, definitely. All my tests with win32 running in a virtual machine
and downloading over the virtual network worked without any problems.
And my test installation viw mirror.ctan.org, too. So it seems that you
have some rather crappy mirrors around you.

The other issues we will try to resolve ASAP, but since I am leaving for
one week don't expect too much during these days. Maybe Siep can fix the
file association thingies, and if someone has an idea regarding the
Popup.al ...


Best wishes

Norbert

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Dr. Norbert Preining <preining at logic.at>        Vienna University of Technology
Debian Developer <preining at debian.org>                         Debian TeX Group
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