[XeTeX] Problem updating TeXLive in Windows

John Was john.was at ntlworld.com
Wed Dec 17 12:05:33 CET 2008


Dear Peter

Thanks for that - it sounds very like what is happening, and I'll see if I 
can make progress in the light of this information (but I've just 
reinstalled TeXLive and want to do some experimentation with it first).  If 
I remember correctly, the .infra package was *not* listed when I first 
attempted an update, but I can't recall what the latest situation is.  At 
the moment there is no harm done since for 'real' work I'm using the 2007 
installation on another machine - but during the intervening year there were 
many interesting developments such as \interchartoks which it was 
frustrating not to be able to use, and no doubt that situation will repeat 
itself during 2009.

Best wishes


John



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Peter Dyballa" <Peter_Dyballa at Web.DE>
To: "Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms" <xetex at tug.org>
Sent: Wednesday, December 17, 2008 10:28 AM
Subject: Re: [XeTeX] Problem updating TeXLive in Windows



Am 17.12.2008 um 08:52 schrieb John Was:

> But using the GUI the package updated
> perfectly from that site until the final step, which has to be done
> manually
> with updater.bat, as the GUI itself informs the user:  at that
> point it not
> only fails but also disables TL Manager permanently, requiring a
> complete
> uninstall and reinstall of TeXLive (this takes ages!).

What you describe might be something that has been encountered by
many users of tlmgr: when it updates itself it removes itself! The
GUI is using some Perl scripts. When one of them is deleted during
the update procedure then it also has to fail, at least at some
moment when this script is called.

It seems to be recommended to first check if and which updates are
available. If the packages texlive.infra and bin-texlive are listed,
then it's recommended to either install them at once (tlmgr will be
replaced, TeX Live binaries will be replaced, causing also the re-
creation of FMT files, MAP files, ...) or leave them out till the
end. In this latter case it might happen that tlmgr gains some new
functionality and you might need to run it again to see whether new
updates are available.

For UNIX PCs a recovery script for tlmgr exists that re-installs the
updated tlmgr when it is run or executed. For MS Windows a similiar
means *has* to exist when tlmgr is not meant as a failure by itself.
So, when tlmgr makes itself unusable by an update, you should not
delete and reinstall TeX Live 2008 but just fetch this recovery
script and execute it.

Visit http://www.tug.org/texlive/tlmgr.html (I don't know whether
it's too early or the fact that I installed the latest security
update from Apple and my Mac OS X does not work completely, but this
site hurts in my eyes!). There you'll see a paragraph "Disaster
recovery" – and it points to http://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/
tlnet/2008/update-tlmgr-latest.exe. http://ctan.org/tex-archive/
CTAN.sites lists mirrors.

--
Greetings

   Pete

Encryption, n.: A powerful algorithmic encoding technique
employed in the creation of computer manuals.



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