[texhax] Win32 installer still needed?

[Karl Berry]

Hi Christopher,

Thank you very much for writing.

    If this is the wrong address for these questions, please accept my
    apologies.

Well, tex-live at tug.org is probably the best place to discuss it, but the
important thing is that you wrote at all :).

    I have a few questions about installing TeX Live on Windows, if
    someone has a moment to answer them.

    Is a Windows installer program still needed for TeX Live?

There are projects underway, see below.  I imagine help would be
welcome.

    Does anyone have a list of requirements for an installer?

Sebastian and I wrote some background response to a previous
query, see the thread at:
http://tug.org/mailman/htdig/tex-live/2004-November/007447.html

    Is RDF / TPM preferred over the Microsoft(TM) installer?

Well, opinions differ.  Fabrice Popineau, the long-time maintainer of
fpTeX (Web2c under Windows), is now working on XEmTeX, with an MSI-based
installer.

Another volunteer is working on a Python-based installer using the TPM
files directly.

And there is a command-line installer for Windows now, which also uses
the TPM's.  Written by Pawel Jackowski since the TL 2004 release.  See
http://tug.org/tex-live/windows.html.

If you're interested in helping any of the above, let me know and we can
discuss further.  I would hate to see any volunteer assistance for
Windows go unused :).

    After using LaTeX 2.09 in the early 1990's, I switched to Windows
    computers and haven't touched LaTeX in over ten years. I couldn't
    seem to forget the quality of print when using LaTeX for a simple
    letter, forms, and larger documents. I joined TUG and now have a
    copy of TeX Live 2004. Installation with Cygwin and the MinGW MSys
    shell hasn't worked 

In order to get going with TeX without writing your own installer :),
you might try the tltpm command-line installer above, or the protext
installation, which is based on miktex instead of web2c.
    
    and I thought about writing my own installer. I've explored the
    basics of RDF which I found interesting with the potential for
    software installation. If I can make time from other projects I will
    continue my explorations.

I don't know much about RDF.  We maintain the TeX Live packages as TPM
files, as I guess you know.  If TPM can be automatically converted to
RDF, I suppose it is a possibility.

Regards,
Karl