Undesirable nul file with tlmgr.bat under Windows

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2019-07-22 at 09:24:21 +0900, Norbert Preining wrote:

 > Reinhard, on win32 platform support is not present, because links
 > are not supported.

Hi Norbert,
sure, but I assumed that Torsten tries this under Cygwin with
bin/win32 in PATH.  Under Cygwin Perl assumes that he's under Cygwin
and the restriction doesn't exist.  The question is whether tlmgr
allows to add binaries to the system which is currently in use.

But I don't think that there is any reason to support such a mixture
of operating systems.  TeX Live allows to install binaries for various
platforms at once (though not under Windows).  Everything works fine.

Everything works as expected if TeX Live is set up properly at install
time on Cygwin.  I've described the details in a previous mail and
don't want to repeat them here.

There are only two points worth a discussion:

  1. Installing TL for both, Windows and Cygwin is a common case and
     works like a charm.  If users still run into trouble, maybe the
     documentation has to be improved.

  2. Given that Cygwin and Windows share the same file system and
     symlinks are regular files on Cygwin, tlmgr and the installer
     could allow to add binaries for Cygwin even under Windows.  But
     as I said in a previous mail, thorough testing is required in
     advance.

     Please also note that all this is not necessary if people set up
     their systems properly.  It makes much more sense to improve the
     documentation in order to prevent people from running into the
     problems Torsten encountered.  Such problems are easily avoidable
     with proper documentation.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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