[tex-live] tl17 pretest init

[Siep Kroonenberg]

On Wed, Apr 19, 2017 at 12:32:45PM +0100, Philip Taylor wrote:
> 
> 
> Siep Kroonenberg wrote:
> > On Wed, Apr 19, 2017 at 07:39:22AM +0100, Philip Taylor wrote:
> >> New bug reports :
> >>
> >> 1) Using "install-tl-advanced.bat", and click-and-drag in (e.g.,) the TEXDIR dialogue box does not clear the inverse-video "selected" indication when a character is typed
> > You complain about this dialog every year, and it is not something
> > we can fix.
> I accept that, yet find it very odd; it is the */only/* application (of hundreds, if not thousands, installed on my machines) that fails to respect the host O/S standards for the user interface.  Surely I am not the only user who routinely re-locates the various TeXMF trees from their default locations with every new release of TeX Live.  I may be the only person to report the problem, but I am certain that I am not the only one to be inconvenienced by it.

We are not happy about it ourselves, but I see no simple remedy.

> >> 2) The "Cancel" button of that dialogue box is  at best unreliable and at worst completely useless.
> > I cannot reproduce this.
> It happened to me twice today; on the first occasion it finally dismissed the box after eight or nine clicks; on the second, not even 20 would suffice, so I had to resort to the [X] button.
> >
> >> 3) The installer informed me that C:\TeX\Live\2017 was unwriteable until I created it by hand (the installer had been invoked using "Run as administrator".
> > This is one level deeper than the installer is willing to create.
> Is there any reason for that restriction ?  A 3-level hierarchy such as C:\TeX\Live\2017 seems very logical to me, and allows the parallel trees C:\TeX\Live\2016 and C:\TeX\Projects.  Without the necessary-and-sufficient three levels, my C:\TeX\Live\TeXMF\Local tree would be forced one level higher, to C:\TeX, whereas it in fact a part of TeX Live rather than TeX /qua/ TeX.

If you do have C:\TeX\Projects, then c:\TeX would normally already
exist, and you would not run into this.

> Philip Taylor also wrote:
> >
> >>     PERL5LIB=E:\TeX\Live\2017\tlpretest\tlpkg\tlperl\lib
> >> yet SET does not disclose this variable :
> > It is created by the batchfile wrapper. We shall exclude it from the
> > environment test.
> But why is it set to E: when I am installing on C: ?

It points to the perl of the installer, not the perl of the
installed system. Long ago, we tried setting environment variables
in windows from within perl, but that did not work right. But
setting them in the wrapper has the unfortunate consequence that
perl noes not see the original environment anymore.

-- 
Siep Kroonenberg