TL2024 from .iso fail under cygwin (win11 pro)

[John Collins]

On 4/27/24 9:19 PM, Reinhard Kotucha via tex-live wrote:

>   >
>   >    It seems you are using Cygwin and haven't installed Cygwin's
>   >    wget.
> But the error message doesn't have to tell users which operating system
> they use.  They want to know how to proceed.

The complication here is that both of Cygwin and the underlying Windows 
operating system are in play, and PATH contains both native Windows executables 
and Cygwin-specific executables.  In this context, I would avoid calling Cygwin 
an operating system.

The point of mentioning Cygwin explicitly is to emphasize to the user that 
there are special quirks involved.


> So something like "No wget found in PATH.  Please install wget." is
> preferred.
> 
> There is no need to tell Cygwin users to install wget on Cygwin.
> Where else should they install it?

It could be installed as a native Windows wget.

Don't forget that Windows already provides curl, which is in the default Cygwin 
PATH.   The Unix installer tries to do the download using that curl, but it 
fails.  As David pointed out, the problem is that the name of the output file 
('/tmp/...') is one that is incorrectly interpreted by a normal Windows 
program.  I assume that if a native Windows wget were installed it would be 
found in PATH, be tried by the installer, and would also fail.

Installing either or both of Cygwin's curl and wget solves the problem, given 
the default setting of PATH by Cygwin.  This is just because the 
Cygwin-specific binary directories are inserted at the front of PATH, ahead of 
the standard Windows directories.

>> See the TeX Live Guide....
> 
> I definitely prefer a solution which doesn't pollute the TeX Live
> Guide and I suppose that a proper error message is sufficient.

I don't understand here.  The TeX Live documentation already has sections 
listing specific considerations for particular operating systems etc.  That 
includes a section about Cygwin, with explicit mention of wget.

John