[tlbuild] duplicates in win32

[George N. White III]

2010/6/14 Vladimir Volovich <vvv at vsu.ru>:
> "GNW" == George N White writes:
>
>  GNW> Some sites have the texmf trees on shared, noexecute, storage.
>  GNW> Others will systematically disable execute permissions in "data"
>  GNW> directories.  Perhaps wrappers that give the script as an argument
>  GNW> to the appropriate program are needed for all platforms., not only
>  GNW> Windows.
>
> apparently, unix bin directories are already extensively using symlinks
> in the bin trees (and nobody reported it as a problem, at least into the
> texlive mailing list, as far as i remember). those few large sites which
> use such unusual setups with nonexecute storage for texmf tree, could
> just replace symlinks with 1-line shell wrappers.
>
>  >> installing them as symlinks would:
>
>  GNW> (or using wrappers)
>
>  >> * save some space (only one copy of the script, instead of
>  >> duplicating  it in each binary directory; and some of them are quite
>  >> big)
>  >>
>  >> * avoid possible synchronization problems, when different
>  >> architectures  get outdated copy of some script
>
>  GNW> And:
>
>  GNW> * eliminate the need to update binary packages for all the <archs>
>  GNW> when a script is changed.
>
>  GNW> * simplify the problem of sorting out messy hash-bang lines (if
>  GNW> the scripts are not going to be executed, the first line can be a
>  GNW> comment indicating the "language", e.g., perl, ruby, etc. ).
>
> if we're going to do such change, why not simply put a hash-bang there?

Authors like to use "#! /usr/bin/perl", but on older systems that may be a
really old perl, so path will have been set to use a different perl.

> but as far as i understand, we can't afford to change every single
> upstream script (if it is not using a hash-bang already), because of
> maintenance problems (need to remember to change it every time the
> script is upgraded).

The change has to be something easily automated, such as prepending
lines that will

#! /bin/echo 'TeX Live perl script to be invoked using a wrapper.'
# exit 1

>  GNW> This can be used to automate the task of assigning the appropriate
>  GNW> wrapper to each script.
>
> also, symlinks are just executing the script quickly. on the other hand,
> if we'll be using a wrapper on unix, which would search and analyze the
> scripts in the texmf tree, it will unnecessarily slow things down.

I'm not too concerned with the overhead of a kpathsea search to find
a script.

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia