[tex-live] Tex-live

[Andrew Myers]

Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard wrote:
> Andrew Myers a écrit :
>   
>> Hey, could you have made Tex-Live more painful to download and build?
>>     
>
> Here is another (more interesting) question: could you help us to make it less
> painful, with the constraints we have to face (like limited bandwidth of CTAN
> sites)? Or at least, could you please be more precise concerning which steps of
> the download & build process you would like us to improve?
>   
> By the way, TeX Live is intended to be installed in binary form, only somewhat
> expert users are expected to build it.
>   
>> Zipped with a program that isn't
>> easy to build it itself, for one.
>>     
> But it is the most efficient we could find, and bandwidth is limited. There 	are
> other ways to download the sources than the tarballs if you don't like them.
> You can try rsync or svn, see: http://tug.org/texlive/svn/. The tarballs are
> mainly intended for (linux|bsd|whatever) distributors.
>
> Manuel.
>   
I appreciate cool compression technology, but I doubt the bandwidth 
difference is enough to make it worthwhile to inconvenience your 
(potential) users. Shallow tool chains are important too! So my precise 
suggestion is, distribute the tarballs compressed with bzip2. If lzma 
isn't saving you 25% on top of bzip2, I don't think it's worth it. You 
can always provide the lzma-compressed stuff too.

I grabbed the lzma source but it's a little messier than I want to deal 
with. So I pulled Tex-Live with svn, which worked fine and I built the 
things I needed I'm a Linux user FWIW.

Thanks,

-- Andrew