[tex-live] TL'10 pretest trial

[Philip Taylor (Webmaster, Ret'd)]

Remind by a message from Barbara that I had not yet started
participating in TeX Live 2010 trialling, I decided to take
advantage of the fact that I had gained a day (I thought today
was Monday, and was very confused when both my central
heating system and my computer claimed it was Sunday) to
make a start; I am afraid that initial impressions are not very
favourable :

1)  At http://tug.org/texlive/pretest.html

this part is OK :

> Downloading
>
> You can retrieve the pretest files from one of these hosts. Our thanks to all of them for making their space and bandwidth available. You can either do a network installation of TL or mirror the whole directory:
>
>     * To do a network installation, download either install-tl-unx.tar.gz (Unix) or install-tl.zip (larger; Windows or Unix), unpack it, and run the included install-tl script, as described below.

but this part :

> Installing
>
> After downloading as above, you can run the script install-tl (Unix) or install-tl.bat (Windows) to perform the installation:
>
>     * install-tl location -gui text for text (command line) mode; default on Unix.
>     * install-tl location -gui wizard for a maximally simplified GUI installation asking only the minimal questions; default on Windows.
>     * install-tl location -gui perltk for advanced/expert GUI installation with the usual array of options; requires Perl/Tk.
>
> In the case of the installer package, the pretest repository location to install from must be specified:
> install-tl -repository http://somehost/some/path ...
> The exact http://somehost/some/path urls to use are link targets on the texlive-pretest mirmon page.

is extraordinarily poor :

2) Option-3 should read :

install-tl-advanced  -location=<location> ! for advanced/expert GUI installation

3) The text "In the case of the installer package" conveys nothing.

4) The text "The exact http://somehost/some/path urls to use are link targets on the texlive-pretest mirmon page"

is far too opaque : "are link targets" is only too easily missed, and as the
real "targets" appear nowhere in plain text on the referenced page (why not ?),
it takes some time to realise one has to dereference a link to find a real
value for "-location".

5) The GUI installer seems just as buggy as the 2008 version (this is now 2010) --
click at-end and reverse drag to highlight the value of the field "Enter path for TeXdir ..."
followed by overtype /still/ leave the newly typed text highlit and self-destructing.

When I first reported this in 2008, I was told a new version of PERLTK was needed
to address this problem; the same was repeated in 2009; surely two years after
my first report, a  newer version must by now have emerged ???

** Phil.