Bug with the latest texlive installer on Windows

[Siep Kroonenberg]

On Thu, Jun 27, 2019 at 04:17:03PM -0700, rhn.grg at gmail.com wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I noticed this issue with the latest texlive GUI installer on a Windows 10
> PC. It seems like the texlive installer doesn't handle spaces in program
> paths correctly. It works only after copying the texlive install directory
> (install-tl-20190627) to a path that doesn't have spaces.
> 
> Here are the outputs when trying to run from two different directories.
> 
> 1. Directory with spaces in the path.
> 
> $ c:\New folder\install-tl-20190627>install-tl-windows.bat
> 
> This exits with the following error message popout.
> 
>     Error starting Perl backend.
>     Level 1: main_prog
>     Level 2: err_exit {Error starting Perl backend}
> 
> 2. Directory with no spaces in the path.
> 
> $ c:\install-tl-20190627>install-tl-windows.bat
> 
> (This runs successfully.)
> 
> I did some further debugging, which led me to the following source of
> error. It seems like the problematic lines are in
> tlpkg/installer/install-tl-gui.tcl (lines: 1853 - 1857).
> 
>  ...
> 1852   # start install-tl-[tcl] via a pipe.
> 1853   set cmd [list "|${::perlbin}" "${::instroot}/install-tl" \
> 1854                "-from_ext_gui" {*}$::argv 2>@1]
> 1855   show_time "opening pipe"
> 1856   if [catch {open $cmd r+} ::inst] {
> 1857     err_exit "Error starting Perl backend"
> 1858   }
>  ...
> 
> I'm not that familiar with Tcl/Tk, but perhaps the paths to $perlbin and to
> $install-tl need to be sanitized/quoted in line 1853? I tried adding the
> quotes (using \"), but it didn't work for me; perhaps, someone more
> familiar with Tcl/Tk can fix this.

I'll look into it. Thanks for the report.

-- 
Siep Kroonenberg