[tex-live] TeX Live 2011 release available

Rolf Dieterich rolf.dieterich at arcor.de
Sat Jul 23 09:50:21 CEST 2011


Hi Karl,

> If anyone notices stale or missing information on the TL web pages, or
problems with the release, please report as usual.

I have some suggestions (most of them are Windows specific).

1. I was rsyncing with option -a to a local repository with the NTFS file
system. Installing directly from this repository failes because the ACL
executable rights (for perl.exe, wget.exc, etc.) are missing.

This behaviour is mentioned in http://tug.org/texlive/acquire-mirror.html:
"If you are on Windows, you must ensure that all the *.bat, *.dll, and
*.manifest files are executable.  Either the mirroring software or the
original mirror usually clears executable permissions."

Perhaps it could also be described how one can achieve this:
a) setting the executable rights with Windows Explorer --> not recommanded
because these settings get lost during the next rsync -a
b) Unpack tlnet\install-tl.zip and install from the unpacked zip archive.
c) Like in a zip archive the ACL is also not preserved in the ISO 9660 file
system. So one could of course build an ISO image file (with mkisofs,
UltraISO and the like), mount/burn it and install from there. --> awkward

2. There is the new key "auto-remove" for the tlmgr configuration file, see
http://tug.org/pipermail/tex-live/2011-May/028977.html
This useful option is not mentioned in
http://tug.org/texlive/doc/tlmgr.html#configuration_file

3. ISO (or DVD) installations
According to
http://tug.org/texlive/doc/texlive-en/texlive-en.html#x1-440004.3
it seems straight-forward to build a live system on Windows. This sounds too
optimistic.
The main problem I see is that the texmf-var and texmf-config trees can't
live in the non-writable medium. At least mkluatexfontdb, ConTeXt and
TeXworks need write-access.
I don't see how this problem is settled by the new tl-tray-menu.exe or the
"Network TeX installations for Windows clients"
(http://tug.org/texlive/w32client.html).

I noticed that there are differences to TeX Live 2010 where building a live
system worked just fine. There was a tl-portable.bat which checked the
existence of texmf.cnf in the home directory and called tl-install with the
parameter -from_dvd (so to say a tiny second installation on the client
machine). Nowadays this parameter doesn't exist anymore. I solved it for me
by modifying the old tl-portable.bat (xcopying texmf-var and texmf-config
from DVD to ~, setting the environment variables TEXMFSYSVAR and
TEXMFSYSCONFIG accordingly and starting the TL shell).

Many thanks to the whole team for TeX Live 2011,
Rolf



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