[tex-live] Bug in install-tl.sh (TeX Collection '03 and TLC2)

[Ulrich M. Schwarz]

(Oh, btw: tex-demo at tug.org, which is given within install-tl.sh itself
as a contact address, bounced on me.)

Dear TeX-Live team,

I have, regrettably, discovered that install-tl will break on systems
with too new a ls:

Apparently, with recent versions of GNU ls (5.2.1 fails, 4.1 used to
work), the output format for the file date has changed:

# ls (fileutils) 4.1 (as shipped with SuSE 8.0)
: ~/temp/fixtl [0 534]; /mnt/datadisk/bin/ls -l /dvd/bin
total 112
drwxr-xr-x    2 root     root        32768 Sep 28  2003 i386-linux
drwxr-xr-x    2 root     root        32768 Sep 28  2003 powerpc-darwin6.6
drwxr-xr-x    4 root     root        49152 Mar 11 13:49 win32

# ls (coreutils) 5.2.1 (as ships with slackware 10)
: ~/temp/fixtl [0 540]; ls -l /dvd/bin
total 112
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 32768 2003-09-28 20:50 i386-linux
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 32768 2003-09-28 20:50 powerpc-darwin6.6
drwxr-xr-x  4 root root 49152 2004-03-11 13:49 win32

As a consequence, install-tl.sh cannot extract platform names from the
bin/ directory and (silently!) fails to install any binaries at all
(It expects the name in record 9, whereas it is record 8 with the
newer version), consequently (again, silently) fails to build formats
and all sorts of "It's not working" fun ensue.

As a fix, I would suggest that line 60 in series_init be changed as
follows:

systems=`(cd $BIN; ls -l | grep "^d" | awk '{print $9}')`

to

systems=`(cd $BIN; ls -l | awk '/^d/ {print $NF}')`

which will eliminate a spurious call to grep as well and should work
as long as the file name is the last entry in the line. (This will
break for symlinks, but I do not think that ought to happen under
these circumstances. This will also break if platform names may
contain spaces and need not be unique in their last "word", but so did
the old one.)

All the same, I would like to take the opportunity to point out that
TL/TC is a wonderful and highly useful collection, which has, more
than once, saved me from either hours of downloading and installing or
coping with the antique installations of TeX and friends some
distributors see fit to, well, distribute.

Sincerely, 
 Ulrich Schwarz
-- 
Dein Haar ist wie ein Motor. Ohne regelmäßige Wartung läßt seine
Leistung nach.