[tex-live] Bug in install-tl.sh (TeX Collection '03 and TLC2)

[Olaf Weber]

Ulrich M Schwarz writes:

> (Oh, btw: tex-demo at tug.org, which is given within install-tl.sh itself
> as a contact address, bounced on me.)

> Dear TeX-Live team,

> I have, regrettably, discovered that install-tl will break on systems
> with too new a ls:

> Apparently, with recent versions of GNU ls (5.2.1 fails, 4.1 used to
> work), the output format for the file date has changed:

> # ls (fileutils) 4.1 (as shipped with SuSE 8.0)
> : ~/temp/fixtl [0 534]; /mnt/datadisk/bin/ls -l /dvd/bin
> total 112
> drwxr-xr-x    2 root     root        32768 Sep 28  2003 i386-linux
> drwxr-xr-x    2 root     root        32768 Sep 28  2003 powerpc-darwin6.6
> drwxr-xr-x    4 root     root        49152 Mar 11 13:49 win32

> # ls (coreutils) 5.2.1 (as ships with slackware 10)
> : ~/temp/fixtl [0 540]; ls -l /dvd/bin
> total 112
> drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 32768 2003-09-28 20:50 i386-linux
> drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 32768 2003-09-28 20:50 powerpc-darwin6.6
> drwxr-xr-x  4 root root 49152 2004-03-11 13:49 win32

This is because the output format of the date is sensitive to the
locale settings.  Putting an
       export LC_ALL=C
somewhere suitable in the script should work, and is probably (part
of) the best solution.

> As a consequence, install-tl.sh cannot extract platform names from the
> bin/ directory and (silently!) fails to install any binaries at all
> (It expects the name in record 9, whereas it is record 8 with the
> newer version), consequently (again, silently) fails to build formats
> and all sorts of "It's not working" fun ensue.

> As a fix, I would suggest that line 60 in series_init be changed as
> follows:

> systems=`(cd $BIN; ls -l | grep "^d" | awk '{print $9}')`

> to

> systems=`(cd $BIN; ls -l | awk '/^d/ {print $NF}')`

> which will eliminate a spurious call to grep as well and should work
> as long as the file name is the last entry in the line. (This will
> break for symlinks, but I do not think that ought to happen under
> these circumstances. This will also break if platform names may
> contain spaces and need not be unique in their last "word", but so did
> the old one.)

I don't think the platform can contain spaces, as I'm reasonably
certain it would make the configure scripts explode.

-- 
Olaf Weber

               (This space left blank for technical reasons.)