[tex-live] Windows 7 still fails

[Siep Kroonenberg]

On Tue, Sep 25, 2018 at 12:44:09PM -0400, Benedict Holland wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> First off, let me state that I have extreme sympathy for people who have to
> develop for windows. That said, by default, the windows installer running
> on windows 7 breaks with the Perl.exe failing. I had to use the -v gui text
> option and install a full install of Perl.
> 
> A few things about this process, do not tell anyone to disable firewalls or
> anti-virus software. That makes your product look extremely sketchy. I
> understand that you can't plan for everything but if someone told you to
> just run this strange script as root while disabling the firewall and
> anti-virus scanners, you should be very suspicious.
> 
> Also, honestly, you should have it working under windows 7 at this point.
> Turn the firewalls on. Run the installation scripts. Fix the problems. I
> shouldn't have an xz error throwing a perl.exe error. Assume that users are
> installing this in a corporate environment as a local user with reasonable
> security. We are long past the point of saying that users should disable
> computer protections.

Your problems are not everybody's problems. The installer is tested
under Windows 7, without turning off protections, both as a regular
user and as adminstrator.

> Also, make the default install location C:\Users\<local user> if they are
> not running it as admin and C:\Program Files (x86)\ if they are. It's the
> little things like that which will solve a host of problems. If I tried to
> install something as a user on C:\ it would just fail.

On an out of the box Windows installation, regular users _can_ install
software in the root of C:. In a corporate environment, there may be
indeed be more restrictions.

Installing in the root of C: is not uncommon for Windows ports of
open source software. For one thing, some third-party scripts
included in TL may not have been tested with spaces or funny
characters in path names. So it is not clear whether your suggestion
would be an improvement.

Siep