[tex-live] Re: Re: [tug-board] Any news of DVDs ?

[Paweł Jackowski]

Reinhard
> Everything has to be read from the CD *once* and can then be retrieved
> from memory (RAM) many times under Linux.  Does OS/2 use all the
> unused memory for this purpose?

? The problem of slow dvd installation under windows is *not* a problem 
of reading cd or cache (cd/dvd is read once of course), but problem of 
many system calls. Ye, i'm not proud of that, but don't have a better idea.

Karl
> I'm sorry, I don't understand what this means.  Can you give a
> concrete example?

Lets take lm fonts package; consist of over 700 files; insteads of 
calling syscopy for each file (would be a horror), sys is called just a 
couple of times, with wildcards instead of full paths:

	cmd>syscopy texmf-dist/fonts/afm/public/lm/*
	cmd>syscopy texmf-dist/fonts/tfm/public/lm/*
	cmd>syscopy texmf-dist/fonts/type1/public/lm/*
	...

Suh a wildcardish list is built under assumption that the name of 
package is also the name of directories containing files of that package 
(as above).

Now lets take amsfonts package to comparison; it consist of about 300 
files, but while installing from dvd, it takes much *more* time to 
install amsfonts than lm's! Why? All because for some reasons (history?) 
a main directory for amsfonts package is not 'amsfonts' but 'ams' -> 
thus no wildcards heuristic can be used -> thus many system calls are 
performed -> thus slow. While installing from cd, only *one* call is 
performed per package, thus quite fast. And thus I doubt if file system 
or cache or compression or winworld is guilty here...

Regards,
-- 
Pawe/l Jackowski
P.Jackowski at gust.org.pl