64 bits version of TeXLive (pretest 2020) on Windows

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Mon, 9 Dec 2019 at 03:10, Norbert Preining wrote:
>
> Hi Pablo,
>
> I can only underline what Akira said. By far the biggest group of
> if/else in the code are related to Windows, which needs to be treated
> specially. Starting to add on top of this a complication with two
> different Windows versions is bound to create complications that do not
> really pay off, in particular since - as Akira said - the 32bit binaries
> work perfectly well on 64 Windows.

Just out of curiosity though: if TeX Live would just *ship* the 64-bit
Windows binaries which one could installed alongside win32, similar to
how one can install linux binaries alongside, and then let users
manually set the path to the correct binary set if they wish so ...
does that still sound prohibitively unthinkable of as the first step?

(Basically: no out-of-the-box support to install those binaries by
default, exclude the binaries from the DVD set, but allow advanced
users to play with them if they want.)

Are those major if-else sections in the perl code (tlmgr) or somewhere else?

Mojca