[tex-live] texlive 8

[Karl Berry]

    but if Windows isn't treated the same way, we are no further forward.
    we can't have *two* sets of packages.

What?  I didn't think I was proposing anything that would need changes
from what we do now.

    but they do these days expect a better interface than the clunky
    shell script. 

That's a whole separate discussion.  Making a completely different
installation program would be nice, but it's not needed in order to have
an installable-only system (and thus compressed sources).  Your
proposal below is exactly what I had in mind.

    IF Fabrice was able to switch his setup program to read foo.tar.bz2
    from CD instead of reading foo.tpm and getting a list of files,

You could just bzip2 the packages (.tpm.bz2) and all you have to change
is pipe them through bunzip2.

 * we lose the use Fabrice describes of a demo CD (but we could
   have the DVD for that)

See my next message.

 * the end user has to have bzip2 under Unix (or we ship it)

We ship it, definitely.  It is a small program, free software, simple to
install, runs on everything (including windows).

 * you cant browse the CD

True enough, not directly.  But we could have a toc file listing
everything there.

 * it would better to have the metadata in the package file (like rpm 
   or deb)

One step at a time.

 * it would break our existing system, and so mean more testing

Testing, shmesting.

k