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

[Reinhard Kotucha]

>>>>> "Oliver" == Oliver Bandel <oliver at first.in-berlin.de> writes:

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

That's horrible indeed.

  > 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.

Usually Perl scripts are faster than shell scripts because of this
reason.  However, this might even be true for programs which have to
process many files on a hard disk, but it is irrelevant for scripts
which have to copy files from a CD/DVD.

I can copy all texmf trees from the DVD to the hard drive within
40 minutes.  The CPU-time required is only 40 seconds.

A full install (from the DVD) takes 38 minutes and 3.5 minutes CPU-time.

My DVD drive is quite noisy and it seems that the problem is that the
haed has to be moved quite frequently.

I suppose that probably your friend's DVD drive needs more time to
skip to a track.  This is usually no problem but the number of files
in TeXLive is enormous.

  > 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.

Did they provide any useful suggestions?  We talked about improvements
at EuroTeX-2007.  If you want to help, please contact Norbert Preining.
Any help is welcome.

  > 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...

Yes, installing from the CD which contains .zip files is significantly
faster.  As far as I remember it takes 25 minutes here.  But as you
said yourself, the DVD contains a live system.

  > I can offer Perl and OCaml programming.  Perl should be available
  > on most platforms,

I think that Perl exists on all UNIX platforms... 

  > and OCaml can by compiled to native code on most platforms.  So, a
  > specialized installation-program could be provided.

...but this is problematic.  We need one installer which works on all
UNIX systems at least.  It would be nice if it works on Windows too.
It seems that using Perl is the best approach.  As you said yourself,
OCaml can be used on most platforms, but it is highly desirable to
have something which works everywhere.  And it is always problematic
to provide binaries for platforms you don't have access to.

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

Why?

  > 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).

Maybe.  I personally vote for Perl because at the moment nobody has
the time to re-invent everything for Windows again and Perl scripts
can be written quite platform independent.  And TL provides Perl for
Windows already.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha			              Phone: +49-511-4592165
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