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

[Oliver Bandel]

Hello,

I think it's best to subscribe tex-live-ml.

I just subscribed.... hope it will be avialbale soon.


On Tue, May 22, 2007 at 12:23:19AM +0200, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
> >>>>> "Oliver" == Oliver Bandel <oliver at first.in-berlin.de> writes:
> 
[...]
> My DVD drive is quite noisy and it seems that the problem is that the
> haed has to be moved quite frequently.

Today I did copy texlive from DVD to my Mac-HD.
On the Mac (Powerbook) I heard a lot of noise too.
I think the DVD is mechanically ugly... it made noise even when
I didn't read from the CD.
But after starting the   cp -r   I heard a lot of
head repositioning.
That's ugly too.

One thing that on the tex-dl was brought in as ideas
was, to have an DVD-image cretaed by creating it in an
alphabetical order and during installation, reading it
alphabetically.


> 
> I suppose that probably your friend's DVD drive needs more time to
> skip to a track.  This is usually no problem but the number of files
> in TeXLive is enormous.

Yes.

But four hours installation time....
...next day I did a copy-action on a similar (maybe slightly faster)
PC (my own), and the copying needed about 30 minutes.
I don't know how much faster my DVD-drive was, but to mee it seems
that the installation (many head repositionings) together
with the scripts, that run, take so much more time.
But I had to test this in more detail to be sure, where
the bottleneck is (or where all bottlenecks are).


> 
>   > I also had a discussion on the tex-dl-mailinglist about the
>   > organization of the livecd. The DVD-image might be reoranized so
>   > that the data can faster be read.
> 
> Did they provide any useful suggestions?  We talked about improvements
> at EuroTeX-2007.  If you want to help, please contact Norbert Preining.
> Any help is welcome.

See above: alphabetical organization of the DVD-image.
But there were more suggestions and I have to reread the thread
and gather all ideas.

 
[...]
>   > I can offer Perl and OCaml programming.  Perl should be available
>   > on most platforms,
> 
> I think that Perl exists on all UNIX platforms... 
> 
>   > and OCaml can by compiled to native code on most platforms.  So, a
>   > specialized installation-program could be provided.
> 
> ...but this is problematic.  We need one installer which works on all
> UNIX systems at least.


It will:

   =========================================
    Overview

    Objective Caml is the most popular variant of the Caml language.
    From a language standpoint, it extends the core Caml language with
    a fully-fledged object-oriented layer, as well as a powerful module
    system, all connected by a sound, polymorphic type system featuring
    type inference.

    The Objective Caml system is an industrial-strength implementation of
    this language, featuring a high-performance native-code compiler
    (ocamlopt) for 9 processor architectures (IA32, PowerPC, AMD64, Alpha,
    Sparc, Mips, IA64, HPPA, StrongArm), as well as a bytecode compiler
    (ocamlc) and an interactive read-eval-print loop (ocaml) for quick
    development and portability. The Objective Caml distribution includes
    a comprehensive standard library, a replay debugger (ocamldebug),
    lexer (ocamllex) and parser (ocamlyacc) generators, a pre-processor
    pretty-printer (camlp4) and a documentation generator (ocamldoc).
   =========================================

See
  http://caml.inria.fr/ocaml/portability.en.html
for details.

If you miss something, please let me know.


> It would be nice if it works on Windows too.

There could be bytecode provided.
But possibly also native code.

See Win32-Release-Notes:
  http://caml.inria.fr/pub/distrib/ocaml-3.10/notes/README.win32


As there are not many OCaml-progarmmers out there, I know that
I might be solely wanting OCaml to be used.

But the reason I would prefer OCaml over any other language is
it's powerfulness.

When I switched from C to Perl, I had the feeling of: "why should
I ever again use C?". And there were rare cases, when I preferred
C over Perl. But these cases were rare.
When I switched from OCaml to Perl, at least after I was used to it,
it really was ugly to use Perl.... not to mention C. ;-)


> It seems that using Perl is the best approach.  As you said yourself,
> OCaml can be used on most platforms, but it is highly desirable to
> have something which works everywhere.  And it is always problematic
> to provide binaries for platforms you don't have access to.

If there would be setup-files available for all platforms,
for which the TeX-Binaries are available also, then
there should be no problem, IMHO.


> 
>   > Also it might sense to have an ls-R file for the whole
>   > texlive-distribution.
> 
> Why?
> 

I thought this can help in better ordering the installation.
But maybe I missed some point here?


>   > I did not looked into all the installation scripts, but I hink
>   > things can be done easier (I have looked at install-tl.sh and it
>   > seems obviosu to me that this stuff can be handled more
>   > efficiently).
> 
> Maybe.  I personally vote for Perl because at the moment nobody has
> the time to re-invent everything for Windows again and Perl scripts
> can be written quite platform independent.

I the code can be written platform independent but be compiled
to native code for all platforms, this should also be an option?


> And TL provides Perl for
> Windows already.

So, you see, Perl is NOT available on Windows-platforms.


I would prefer OCaml before Perl, and Perl before Shell,
(and Shell before C. ;-))

But this are only ideas.

If the texlive-project's people all prefer Perl, no problem with this,
even if it hurts ;-)

I didn't want to start a Language-clash, I just wanted to offer
more than one possibility (hoping my favourite would also be
interesting for others;-)).

The much more crucial points are:
  - what installation procdure is planned for the future (how to do it)
  - how can bottlenecks be removed (anti-slow)
  - how can the installation made clear (anti-mess)


Regards,
    Oliver