[tex-live] TeXLive-CD/DVD (Installation)

[Oliver Bandel]

Hello,

some days ago I installed the TeXlive-DVD for a friend.
The installation took about 4 hours!

I saw that the $CDROM/texlive/install-tl.sh 
uses a lot of functions, that are used by invoking
shells and subshells and from there calling
tools like sed and grep and so on.

I also had a discussion on the tex-dl-mailinglist
about the organization of the livecd. The DVD-image
might be reoranized so that the data can faster be read.

Also I thought about using tgz-files instead of
a directory-structure. This could be used for faster
copying the data, but the disadvantage is, that
there is no easy way to run the programs from the
CD/DVD then, so the texlive than is != live...

I don't think that four hours installation time are acceptable.

And I want to provide different possibilities for the installation
procedure.

I can offer Perl and OCaml programming.
Perl should be available on most platforms, and OCaml
can by compiled to native code on most platforms.
So, a specialized installation-program could be provided.

Also it might sense to have an ls-R file for the whole
texlive-distribution.

I did not looked into all the installation scripts,
but I hink things can be done easier (I have looked at
install-tl.sh and it seems obviosu to me that this stuff
can be handled more efficiently).


I'm looking forward to hear from you.


Best Regards,
      Oliver Bandel