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<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS">Dear TeX-Live</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS"></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS">Peter Dyballa suggests I may have encountered
a bug in the updating procedure in TeXLive 2008, which I installed today on a
spare machine (but it's going to have to be uninstalled again as I've lost
access to the TL manager GUI).</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS"></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS">Below I repeated </FONT><FONT
face="Arial Unicode MS">the two messages I posted to the TeX-Live user group
(messages separated by %%%%%%%). </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS"></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS">Can you advise? (Or repair if it is
indeed a bug.)</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS"></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS">Many thanks</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS"></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS"></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS">John Was</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS"></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS"></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS">MESSAGES:</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS"></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS">Following Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard's helpful
message of 9 November, I've finally got round to installing the 2008
distribution of XeTeX on a spare computer running Windows XP Pro (jealously
guarding my 2007 installation until I'm sure all is OK). Immediately after
installation I typed<BR> <BR>tlmgr option location <A
href="http://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet/2008">http://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet/2008</A></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS"></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS">But at the next line of Manuel's instruction,
viz.:<BR> <BR>tlmgr update bin-texlive texlive.infra<BR> <BR>the
routine fails, producing the following error message on
screen:<BR> <BR> <BR>Cannot read any package from <A
href="http://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet/2008/tlpkg/texlive.tlpdb">http://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet/2008/tlpkg/texlive.tlpdb</A>,
seems not to be a TLPDB! Cannot load Tex Live database from <A
href="http://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet/2008">http://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet/2008</A><BR> at
c:/program Files/texlive/2008/texmf/scripts/texlive/tlmgr.pl line
616<BR> <BR>And thus I never get to the third element of Manuel's
instructions, viz.:</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS"></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS">tlmgr update --all</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS"></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS">I've tried it a couple of times, and the same
error is produced. Is it a bug, or do I just give up and go over to a Mac?
(!) I would certainly like to be able to acquire the latest version
painlessly, whenever a new element is added that would be of use to
me.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS"></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS">%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS"></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS">I've now uninstalled XeTeX from the machine
and reinstalled it, this time <BR>trying the GUI to update the installation from
the Web. This fails too: <BR>everything works as expected until the last
step, when the GUI puts up a <BR>message to say that some elements have to be
updated by closing the GUI down <BR>and running the batch file
updater.bat. But alas, that results in an error <BR>message, and after
that point it's impossible to access the TeXLive Manager <BR>at all - it simply
aborts. I've done this twice now, so it wasn't a chance
<BR>fluke.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS"></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS">Thus, it seems that currently there is no
reliable way to update the <BR>installation on a Windows XP machine - though no
doubt some packages could <BR>be updated manually without doing damage, simply
by replacing an older <BR>version of the relevant files with an updated
one. But this is clearly not <BR>very satisfactory.<BR></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS"> </DIV></FONT>
<DIV><FONT face="Arial Unicode MS"></FONT> </DIV>
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