[tex-live] TeX Live 2008 testing - problems downloading

[George N. White III]

On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 8:06 AM, Sandy Nicholson <sandy at ambertext.co.uk> wrote:
> Hello
>
> I thought I'd try out the TeX Live 2008 test release, as I'm quite keen to
> get up to speed with some of the newer stuff (particularly LuaTeX) before I
> run a pilot TeX workshop in September. However, I have had problems getting
> hold of the release.
>
> I downloaded the bootstrap installer, but when I ran install-tl, the
> furthest the download/installation process got was adrconv. Earlier, it
> didn't get that far, but it consistently falls over there now when
> downloading from my local mirror (I'm in the UK). I also tried
>
>  install-tl -url ftp://tug.org/texlive/tlnet/tldev
>
> with slightly greater success: it got as far as bin-context on one run.
> Unfortunately the process isn't (as far as I know) resumable, so I have to
> start from scratch each time. Is this a temporary problem with server loads,
> or is there anything else I can try?

If you are using wget you can try adjusting the tries = NN value (the first
one I tried had tries=2) in install-tl/tlpkg/installer/wgetrc.   Curl probably
has some similar option.

> Incidentally, in case it's relevant, I'm doing this on an Intel Mac, and the
> only customisation I did each time was to set the TEXMFHOME directory to
> ~/Library/texmf (for consistency with the MacTeX 2007 distribution).

There are similar problems with linux installers, but they tend to download
all the archives first, and delete them only after a successful install.  Then
using a downloader that skips already downloaded files, restarting will
work, although there is still the issue of having to redo configuration
on each restart.

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia