[tex-live] Testing and Upgrading on Windows

[texlive.jlists at spamgourmet.com]

On Tue, 28 Jun 2011 22:55:12 +0200, Siep Kroonenberg <siepo at cybercomm.nl>
wrote:

>
> We are about at final freeze. Any new fixes now won't make it to
> the dvd, but after release fixes can be applied to the net
> installer and other components.
>

Since the things that went wrong below are due to spaces in directory names,
that probably does no harm to installing from DVD - there should rarely be
spaces in its mount point in Windows.

>> Firstly, installation *from* a path with spaces fails. Tl-install fails 
>> to
>> find xz (probably perl as well - I could not determine which perl got 
>> used
>> in the end.) and thus fails to extract the downloaded containers.
>
> I could not reproduce this. Are you sure the zipfile got unpacked
> correctly?



>> tar: Could not change access and modification times of tlpkg/tlperl:
>> Permission denied

>> C:/Programs/Documents/TeXLive/2011/temp/tlperl.win32.tar.xz: Permission
>> denied at

>> There seems to be some race-condition. To avoid these, I think an 
>> option is
>> to use some directory inside %TEMP% (eg. %TEMP%/texlive) as location for
>> temporary files instead of some place within %programsdir%.

> We are familiar with random `Permission denied' errors on Windows
> and are still at a loss what to do about them.
>
> Why do you think this might help? This is a real question, not an
> attempt at sarcasm.
>

At least on the system in question, I could discover two jobs continuously
monitoring the file system for new files:
1. Windows Search (indexing service)
2. backup cron job
and on most system there probably is also
3. virus scanner
That said, what the installer is doing here is "uncommon": Files installed
normally do not get accessed immediately after. - This *might* be the reason
(one of the reasons?) here.

While I am in favour of asking the user to disable (3) during installation
(this request seems to be quite common, especially for installations not
using the system build-in installer), there will still be (1), (2).
Nonetheless, these will most likely exclude known locations for temporary
files (as %TEMP%).

Best,
Dominic