[tex-live] problems with tl2016 pretest

[Zdenek Wagner]

2016-05-14 0:14 GMT+02:00 Karl Berry <karl at freefriends.org>:

>     it just may be an issue of the design of tl-install, in that it
>     doesn't overlap "download the next file" with "unpack this file".
>
> Doing the operations (install package A while downloading the next
> package B) concurrently is indeed beyond the scope of the implementation
> as it stands.  And it doesn't sound easy, or reliable, to accomplish :(. -k
>

It is very difficult. You have packages of different size and users have
different bandwidth. In theory, you may quickly download several small
packages if you have a gigabit line and it may cause concurrent unpacking
and installation of several packages, so you may end up with many processes
which will mean that yout tcp/ip subsystem might discard incoming packages
due to overloading of the processor. It could be solved by having one
process for downloading that would put the names of downloaded packages to
a queue and another process will unpack and install them. If you have Intel
i5 or better, it will work but if you install to Raspberry Pi, it may cause
problems due to limited resources. Moreover, I am not sure whether the same
IPC is available for all platforms, so such a solution is really difficult
and will need a lot of testing and debugging.



Zdeněk Wagner
http://ttsm.icpf.cas.cz/team/wagner.shtml
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz
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