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

[Norbert Preining]

Hi Oliver,

first of all, thanks a lot for your feedback, and thanks a lot for your
proposal to help us, very much appreciated and needed.

On Mon, 21 Mai 2007, Oliver Bandel wrote:
> some days ago I installed the TeXlive-DVD for a friend.
> The installation took about 4 hours!

This is strange, and abnormal. I assume that the DMA mode for the CDROM
drive was disabled. It is true that it takes some time, but 4h is too
much.

> 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.

Shouldn't be a problem, this is not where time is lost. It is normally
with file access on DVD.

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

Absolutely.

> And I want to provide different possibilities for the installation
> procedure.
> 
> I can offer Perl and OCaml programming.

So here we are at a quite interesting point. We, means I, am currently
reimplementing the infra structure of TeX Live, the so called tpm files.
Our primary reason was to make some strange list files obsolete, and
furthermore allow the update of single packages via the web.

I have already made a test implementation of this stuff in perl.

If you really want to contribute, something all of us will really
wholeheartly appreciate, I can get on and explain you many things. But
it is a hard business, nothing to be digested in half a day. Especially
the intestines of TeX Live are quite hacky to say the least.

Our aim is to clean this mess up, and make updates, installs, all this
easier, more streamlined etc.

Perl programming is much appreciated. Let me know, and I will get in
touch with you.

Best wishes

Norbert

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Dr. Norbert Preining <preining at logic.at>                    Università di Siena
Debian Developer <preining at debian.org>                         Debian TeX Group
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