[tex-live] strange actions of tlmgr (gui, winXP)

[Norbert Preining]

Hi Dan,

thanks for your remarks.

On Di, 07 Jul 2009, Dan Luecking wrote:
> There is, however, the option "Change file associations". This
> seems to be a yes/no option, but the default value is "1" and
> the button says "change" instead of "toggle". Is there some other
> possible value besides 1 and (I assume) 0?

Click the "Change" button and you will see ... wow ... in any case there
is a cancel button ;-)

> On the same "configuration" screen, at the lower left is an area
> for setting default page sizes and on the right an area labeled
> "Actions". One would expect the buttons in the lower left area not
> to perform any of those actions, but merely change the the default
> values. At least _I_ expected that pressing the "letter" button to
> to the right of "default paper for all" would simply change all
> the values listed below it to letter. But it started regenerating
> format files.

Yes that is necessary because the default is part of the *format*!!! So
formats have to be regenerated.

> What _seems_ to happen during the regeneration of the formats
> is the program seems to freeze. I guessed what was happening
> so I waited patiently. It would be nice if there were some
> indication of what was going on. I suppose the log window would

Doesn't the mouse pointer change into a clock or something indicating
activity?

> behind, but it wouldn't gain focus and wouldn't update its display
> until the format generation was complete.

Yes, that is a problem, but we cannot circumvent that because Windows
does not support threads, at least not in the version of perl/Tk we are
using, so we cannot have different threads one for updating the windows
and one for doing the actual task.

Same happens when unpacking/installing a new package, thar un-xzing and
untaring takes some time during which the tlmgr is not responsive.

That is the prize to pay if you want to support soo many architectures
at the same time.

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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