[tex-live] The suggestions (from tex-d-l) (Re: Comment on Re: TeXLive-CD/DVD (Installation))

[Oliver Bandel]

On Wed, May 23, 2007 at 10:39:38PM +0200, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
> >>>>> "Hans" == Hans Hagen <pragma at wxs.nl> writes:
> 
>   > well, in the case of such fresh hardware with enough disk space
>   > i'd copied the whole lot (texmf/texmf-dist) from dvd to disk and
>   > not bothered about subsets or packages apart from the binaries;
>   > copying a dvd directly should be no big deal;
> 
> I made a test yesterday and there is no significant difference between
> using the installer or copying the files to the disk.  
> 
> What certainly matters is the order in which files are written to the
> image.  If they are written in the same order as they are read, it is
> quite likely that installation will be much faster.

Only, if not between any copy of a file the head must go to the
location, where the file lists are.


in Pseudocode:
==============


bad way:
--------

  while true
  do
    lookup_next_filelist();
    copy_files_of_current_filelist()
  done


better would be:
----------------

  lookup_all_filelists();
  copy_all_fils_in_filelist()



I don't know what exactly the installation-script does,
but I would assume, that the first thing is, what
actually is done. If so, this slows down.




> 
> Anyway, at EuroTeX-2007 Norbert made a few proposals and already
> provided some code.  I think that the installer has to be changed
> anyway and things like that can be kept in mind. 
> 
> BTW, some time ago Thomas Esser told me that Knoppix developers have
> exactly the same problem and that they had written a tool which solves
> exactly this problem.  I don't remember any details, maybe even Thomas
> doesn't remember because we talked about it at least two years ago.

Yes, one of the Knoppix' were extremely slow.
I don't know, which it was. The current Knoppix
is quite fast.

Ciao,
   Oliver