[tex-live] Perl for Windows

[Paweł Jackowski]

Hi Reinhard,

let me come back to the main topic;

> when I install the complete TeXLive system on Windows XP, the
> installer does not check whether there is another version of Perl
> already installed on the system.

Since you use TL05, I assume you talk about 'tlpmgui' installer.
The fresh installer version I test a couple of days ago 
(ftp://ftp.gust.org.pl/pub/Projekty/tlpmgui) seems to be more pleasant 
regarding 3rd parties.

> TL prepends the path/to/binaries to PATH and sets the environment
> variable PERL5LIB accordingly.
> 
> The Perl version which had been installed before TeXLive has set the
> value of PERL5LIB somewhere else rather than in the environment
> variables dialog box, maybe in the registry.  Don't know how Windos
> works.
> 
> When I run the command "set" in a DOS window, I see that TeXLive's
> value of PERL5LIB is appended to the value provided by the Perl system
> which had been installed previously.
> 
> When I invoke Perl, I get the Perl provided by TeXLive which then
> complains that the file Config.pl doesn't match its version.
> 
> After I uninstalled TeXLive's Perl using the TL installer it seems
> that everything works.  However, the environment still contains
> useless stuff.

I see this in bugtrack, so should be fixed soon.

> It would be better if the TeXLive installer could check whether a Perl
> system is already installed.  This can be done by running 
> "perl --version". 
> 
> It should be sufficient to add texmf*/scripts to PERL5LIB if
> Perl is installed already.
> 
> If Perl provided by TeXLive is updated once a year it would not be a
> problem to use it and remove the other one.  Unfortunately a Perl
> module I need insists of having Perl installed at C:/Perl instead of
> just running perl -e "print @INC" to find out where to put it.
> Quite annoying...

Personally I hate programs that overwrites anything without saying
'watch out' or at least 'sorry' (: And I also don't use Perl from TL, so 
will insist on pretty fair overwriting policy.

btw, questions suggestions and comments can be sent to

	tlpmgui at gust.org.pl

mailing list.

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