[tex-live] Windows 7 still fails

[Norbert Preining]

Hi Benedict,

many people have already answered to your comments, so I only add a bit
more. First of all, thanks for your comments, they are appreciated!

On Tue, 25 Sep 2018, Benedict Holland wrote:
> 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.

This is strange and unexpected, as mentioned before. It is hard to say
with Windows what might interfere, though.

> 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

You might be right, but there are hardly any installers that unpack
(xz/tar) out there. We consistently get problems with virus scanners
holding off creation of files via tar/xz to check them, which in the end
breaks the un-tar process and the whole installation.

> 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

That sounds all like a *very*nice*theory*, and if would be
*reproducible* then one could check and fix it. The problem with these
kind of errors are that they are 
* mostly confined to certain computers
* there is no recipe to reproduce the same behaviour
If you can consistenly reproduce the problem, and give a recipe that one
of our developers can consistenly reproduce the same behaviour on our
computers, then we can look into it and fix it.

The problem with Windows is that it is roulette, and not computing.

> 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.

Agreed, and I would be happy to have this status.

Actually there is a way, but no volunteer (we are all vounteers) has
stepped forward to do it: Create a repackaged version of TL similar to
MacTeX, with all files already in place, no way to choose any
configuration, and create a normal .msi installer.

Technically not a problem, but I don't have interest and time for doing
it.

Would you step forward to provide something like this?

The maintainer of MacTeX does it also on a volunteer basis and does a
stupendous job. 

All the best

Norbert

--
PREINING Norbert                               http://www.preining.info
Accelia Inc.     +    JAIST     +    TeX Live     +    Debian Developer
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