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

Edd Barrett vext01 at gmail.com
Wed May 23 01:45:40 CEST 2007


On 22/05/07, Reinhard Kotucha <reinhard.kotucha at web.de> wrote:
> We need, at least for UNIX, an installer which works on all platforms.
> Currently it is a shell script which uses some autoconf magic for
> platform detection (config.guess).  The shell script we have now is
> quite fine.  I'm very happy with it and for UNIX it is definitely the
> best solution.

Hi there,

I have do disagree. But allow me to justify myself.

There are too many shells with different syntax. Yes, your installer
works great on systems with bash, mostly linux i suppose. The
installer does not work on my platform of choice. I suspect it is the
shell (ksh), but it could be the tar implementation (not gtar). Either
way shell commands are a bad way to go in my opinion, as they differ
between platfroms, and windows has no good shell unless cygwin is
installed (which is too much to ask for a texlive install I think).
Why not use library calls from say python? This gaurantee's platform
independancy surely?

I don't mean to cause any trouble on the list. Please don't flame me!

-- 
Best Regards

Edd

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