[tex-live] Windows 7 still fails

[Zdenek Wagner]

st 26. 9. 2018 v 4:59 odesílatel Reinhard Kotucha <reinhard.kotucha at web.de>
napsal:
>
> On 2018-09-25 at 12:44:09 -0400, Benedict Holland wrote:
>
>  > 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.
>
> Where exactly are you told to disable the firewall?  AFAIK only virus
> scanners are mentioned.  The firewall shall *never* be disabled.
>
> Anti-virus programs which scan files while they are written to a disk
> shall always never be disabled.  These scanners do not interfere with
> the TeX Live installer, apart of maybe occasionally reporting false
> positives.
>
> Only anti-virus programs which scan the whole disk *and* unnecessarily
> prevent other programs from writing files to a particular directory
> while it's scanned interfere with the installer.  Such programs can
> safely be disabled temporarily, of course, because they are unable to
> detect viruses immediately.  Whenever a virus exists on your disk,
> it's too late anyway.  It might have been executed already before it's
> detected.
>
I am not sure that antivirus software does not interfere. It depends on the
antivirus. As I know, it is possible that a directory is temporarily locked
and is not writable. There was a discussion on it some time ago so probably
now the installer can cope even with this problem. Another problem is that
an antivirus software can interfere with the installer. If I start a
program unknown to the antivirus, the process is killed, the antivirus
examines it and if it passes, the process is started again. The good news
is that if I push th button that I do not want to report the existence of
the unknown program the antivirus remembers is and the next time the
program is whitelisted and runs.

The problems are even larger. I have Windows 7 in a virtual machine and use
subversion and git on it without any problem. Other users take advantage of
my software available from subversion. I explained them how to fetch it and
they do it on Windows XP, 7, 8, Vista, 10. All Windows computers in our
institute are installed by the IT department with the same firewall setting
and with the campus license of the antivirus. Yet on one Windows 10
computer "svn checkout" crashed rporting that the disk is not writable. I
tried to checkout it into another directory, tried to do it as system admin
(with the highest rights as people from the IT department), with antivirus
disabled, with firewall disabled and nothing helped. Windows experts from
the IT department tried to help but we do not understand why it does not
work on this one computer. Finally I did checkout on another computer and
transfered the whole tree on a USB.

I know that I am now a bit off topic but I just wanted to demonstrate that
life with Windows can sometimes be very difficult.


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