[tex-live] TeXLive-CD/DVD (Installation)

David Kastrup dak at gnu.org
Tue May 22 00:42:20 CEST 2007


Reinhard Kotucha <reinhard.kotucha at web.de> writes:

>   > Also I thought about using tgz-files instead of a
>   > directory-structure. This could be used for faster copying the
>   > data, but the disadvantage is, that there is no easy way to run
>   > the programs from the CD/DVD then, so the texlive than is !=
>   > live...
>
> Yes, installing from the CD which contains .zip files is significantly
> faster.  As far as I remember it takes 25 minutes here.  But as you
> said yourself, the DVD contains a live system.

Well, tar files are structured with one block (512 bytes) of file
header followed by file content.  If one has a file system full of tar
files, one can create shadow directory entries for the contents as
long as every block is addressable.  If the data is accessed as a tar
file, it can be read in and processed strictly linearly.  So it should
be possible to get both live system and efficient install system share
the same data.  It will likely be slower than reading .tgz archives,
but it should beat copying from single files handily.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum


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