[tex-live] Bugs in install-tl for win32

[Staszek Wawrykiewicz]

On Fri, 27 Jun 2008, Dan Luecking wrote:

> I have done some additional testing of install-tl for WIN32.

Many thanks for your tests and notes.
 
> [...]
>   Also removed my own versions of perl, tar, wget and lzma.]
This is not needed. As I wrote before, TL uses those programs 
(including small subset of perl) internally and there was big effort done
to let people having them for all other tasks.
 
> I successfully installed texlive-medium. Formats were automatically
> and successfully generated. The only non-routine messages were
> warnings from tar:
>    "Unrecognized file type '2', extracting as ordinary file".
> this happened for several man1 pages. This was harmless as there are
> no programs to display the man pages anyway.
People can use their own man pager, or read man pages in emacs.
And well, the warnings are harmless, as win32 doesn't understand symbolic 
links, so tar unpacks all such links as regular files.
 
> I successfully ran tex, latex and pdflatex several times. I also ran
> tplmg and successfully installed the cm-super package.
Great! 

> - There was this serious bug: Registry entries are changed!!!
>    I did not appreciate the fact that the rather inadequate psv
>    program was substituted for gsview as the default for opening
>    PostScript files. This should never be done without requesting
>    permission and it should certainly not be done without informing
>    the user.

Sure, but TL cannot provide gsview as it is not free software, so we 
decided to put much faster psview. Making the default association for
opening .ps files is always matter of disscusion. Anyway, I'm going to 
update psview this weekend (finally added help in English and much more).

> - There is a second serious bug: Uninstalling TeXLive did not undo
>    those registry changes. I took me quite some effort to determine
>    how to change them back.

Thanks for noticing that. Siep, would you please remove also registry
key for psv when uninstalling?

> Finally, for no apparent reason, install-tl.bat has completely
> ceased to work. There is a complaint of uninitialized value at
> line 1388 of TLutils.pm, followed by much more. [...]

Yes, there is a problem I found yesterday, so please be patient.
We will inform you when to restart your tests. Thanks.

All the best,

-- 
Staszek Wawrykiewicz
StaW at gust.org.pl